under the persons of Aristotle and Alexander, the marquess read the king such a lesson that all the standers-by were amazed at his boldness. The king asked whether he had his lesson by heart, or spake out of the book? 66 Sir, if you would read my heart, it may be that you might find it there; or if your majesty pleased to get it by heart, I will lend you my book." The king accepted the offer. Some of the new-made lords fretted and bit their thumbs at certain passages in the marquess' discourse; and some protested that no man was so much for the absolute power of a king as Aristotle. The marquess told the king that he would indeed show him one remarkable passage to that purpose, and turning to the place, read "A king can kill, a king can save ; A king can make a lord a knave; On this several new-made lords slank out of the room, which the king observing, told the marquess, "My lord, at this rate you will drive away all my nobility." This amusing anecdote is an evidence that this ethical poet, after two centuries and a half, was not forgotten; his spirit was still vital, his volume still lay open on the library table; it afforded a pungent lesson to the courtiers of Charles the First, as it had to those of Richard the Second. GOWER was learned, didactic, and dignified. The manuscripts of his works are usually noble and sumptuous copies; more elegantly written and more richly illuminated than the works of other poets. His common-places and his legendary lore seem to have awed the simplicity of the readers of two centuries, whose taste did not yet feel that failure of the poet who narrated a fable from Ovid with the dull prolixity of a matter-of-fact chronicler. His fictions are rarely imaginative; yet critics, far abler judges of his relative merits than ourselves, since they lived within the sphere of his influence, hailed this grave father of our poesy. Leland, the royal antiquary of Henry the Eighth, expressed his ideas with great elegance and sensibility, when he said of Gower that "his diligent culture of our poesy had extirpated the ordinary herbs; and that the soft violet and the purple narcissus were now growing, where erst was nothing seen but the thistle and the thorn." There are indeed some graceful flowers in his desert. But all criticism is usually relative to the age, and excellence is always comparative. GOWER stamped with the force of ethical reasoning his smooth rhymes; and this was a near approach to poetry itself. If in the mind of CHAUCER we are more sensible of the impulses of geniusthose creative and fugitive touches-his diction is more mixed and unsettled than the tranquil elegance of GOWER, who has often many pointed sentences and a surprising neatness of phrase. A modern reader, I think, would find the style of Gower more easily intelligible than the higher efforts of the more inventive poet. 293 PIERS PLOUGHMAN. CONTEMPORARY with GoWER and CHAUCER lived the singular author of "The Visions of William concerning PIERS PLOUGHMAN;" singular in more respects than one, for his subject, his style, and, we may add, for the intrepidity and the force of his genius. This extraordinary work is ascribed to one whose name is merely traditional, to Robert Langland, a secular priest of Salop; when he wrote, and where he died, are as dubious as his text, the authenticity of which is often uncertain from the variations in all the manuscripts. But the real life of an author, at least for posterity, lies beyond the grave; and no writer is nameless whose volume has descended to us as one of the most memorable in our ancient vernacular literature. In character, in execution, and in design, "The Visions of William of PIERS PLOUGHMAN" are wholly separated from the polished poems of GoWER and CHAUCER; the work bears no trace of their manner, nor of their refinement, nor of their versification; and it has baffled conjectural criticism to assign the exact period of a composition which appears more ancient than any supposed contemporary writings. Those who would decide of the time in which an author wrote by his style, here are at a loss to conceive that the splendid era of romantic chivalry, the age of Edward the Third and his grandson, which produced the curious learning and the easy rhymes of the "Confessio Amantis," and the pleasantry and the fine discriminations of character of "The Canterbury Tales," could have given birth to the antiquated Saxon and rustic pith of this genuine English bard. Either his labour was concluded ere the writings of the court poets had travelled to our obscure country priest in his seclusion in a distant county, or else he disdained their exotic fancies, their latinisms, their gallicisms, and their italianisms, and their trivial rhymes, that in every respect he might remain their astonishing contrast, with no inferiority of genius. There was no philosophical criticism in the censure of this poet by Warton, when he condemns him for not having "availed himself of the rising and rapid improvements of the English language," and censures him for his "affectation of obsolete English.' 99 These rising improvements may never have reached our bard, or if they had, he might have disdained them; for the writer of the Visions concerning Piers Plough |