of circumstances or mighty passions; and that he is, therefore, at the close, almost ashamed of the sympathy with which he has followed Gawayne on his perilous journey. Nevertheless, this romance is the work of a genuine poet, and of a thinking artist. We do not merely discern the intention of presenting certain ideas, they find adequate sensuous expression; their value is brought to our consciousness in concrete human types.

Sir Gawayne differs in metrical form from the Adventures of Arthur, in that the long lines of each strophe have alliteration only, without rhyme, and that their number is not fixed; while the rhymed short lines at the close are introduced by a verse of one accent, in the order, a baba. The first strophes of the second canto, given above, illustrate this. The transition to those creations of our poet having a decided religious colouring is made in a poem that not only suggests but directly describes a crisis in his inner life. It is rightly named The Pearl.

The poet had married (his lord having, perhaps, given him a home of his own as a reward for faithful service). A child, a sweet girl, radiant in innocence, had blessed this union. The father concentrated all his affection upon the child, and so exclusively that we are led to believe the mother had not long survived her birth. The dearest ideals of the thoughtful poet were embodied in his daughter. But the pitiless hand of fate tore her away at the tenderest age. The poem describes the father's feelings at her death, and tells how he was comforted.

It begins in an exalted lyrical strain, with a lament on the lost pearl, whose beauty and splendour are sung in extravagant language. We see the lonely father, spell-bound by grief and longing, lingering on the grave that hides his dearest treasure. He is there overcome by sleep, and a beautiful vision is unfolded to him. The poet finds himself in a smiling spring landscape, with stately trees and beauteous flowers, singing birds of lovely plumage and shining rocks, from which he is separated by a clear, murmuring brook. On the opposite shore he beholds his vanished pearl, more beautiful and resplendent than he had ever seen her. His attempts to reach her are vain. A discourse between the mourning father and the transfigured daughter ensues,

that fills the breast of the bereaved man now with great joy, and now with anxious pain and doubt. But all doubts are finally resolved; the father no longer wonders at the high honour vouchsafed his child in heaven. He learns to prize the dignity of innocence, and the bliss of leaving the world in unstained childhood. With his own eyes he beholds his daughter in the ranks of those that surround the Lamb of the Apocalypse. His pain passes away in joy at her happiness, and in wonder at divine wisdom and love; and his longing is purified in submission to the divine will.

Full of deep and delicate feeling, rich in thought and creative fancy, the poem was decidedly influenced by the allegorical poetry of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as regards choice, combination, and treatment of motives. Yet here, as in the Divine Comedy, the allegory is lifted almost to symbolism by its earnestness and intensity, and by the evident mysticism which is connected with a wellknown passage of the Apocalypse. The poet modelled diction and form after those of a colleague in art from the Welsh Marches, almost contemporary with him, and the author of a Song of Merci, a Song of Deo gracias,1 and other poems. In these there is also a close union of lyrical and didactic elements, noble language with real wealth of thought, and, more rarely, an inclination to allegory and symbolism. Here, too, we find the strophe employed by the poet of The Pearl; it has twelve lines with four accents, rhymed according to the scheme, a b a b a babbcbc, and combining rhyme with alliteration. The strophes close with a sort of refrain, to which the beginning of each following strophe is often joined by the repetition of a word. All these expedients, reminding us of the more ancient western lyrics, and, above all, of Laurence Minot's ballads, are used very consistently by the author of The Pearl. At the same time he increases the technical difficulties by attempting symmetrical relations of verse on a larger scale. The poem contains twenty parts, each having five strophes,2 and, like the close

1 Published by Furnivall in Early English Poems and Lives of Saints, pp. 118 and 124. To the same poet may belong the poems printed on pp. 130 and 133 of that work.

2 In Morris's edition (Early English Alliterative Poems), the poem has twenty-one divisions; but the sixteenth and seventeenth are really one. One division, moreover, counts six strophes (No. 15). This is certainly not due to artistic intention, but was either an oversight of the poet or an interpolation.

and beginning of the strophes, the single parts are also united by the repetition of the same, or a related word, now and then of a homonym, while the last line of the poem corresponds with the opening one. In this most artificial form, which, according to our feeling, is little adapted to the subject, the poet works with perfect ease. His diction is faulty only in too great copiousness, and his descriptions in too much wealth and brilliancy.

Two main ideas are put forth in The Pearl, both already presented, if not with equal force, in Gawayne: the ideas of innocence (purity) and of submission to the divine will. Each of them was treated by the poet later in a special work, Clannesse and Pacience.

These, the most mature products of his art, take the ground of religious didactics. The starting-point in both poems is the Sermon on the Mount, in the gospel of St. Matthew. But as the thought is perceptive and the expression metaphorical, we have genuine poetry also in these works. But the subjective element, so strong in The Pearl, makes itself but occasionally felt, appearing most clearly in the introductions to the two poems. The aim of the writer, as in Gawayne, is to present his idea objectively. He chooses from Old Testament history those topics teaching, by the depiction of their opposites, the virtues of purity and patient submission. Thus he joins the religious epic poets of his nation, and at once reaches the highest rank among them. He is not to be compared with such men as the composers of the Genesis and Exodus, or the Cursor mundi; for he can measure himself with the best among the Old English religious poets. Tenderer than the author of the Judith, but much less vague than Cynewulf, he is superior to the former in delicacy and yields him nothing in clearness. He is excelled by none in power of expression and fresh sensuousness of description, when we take into account the youthful vigour of the language and the abundant epic tradition from which those older poets could draw. It is true, he has the advantage of wider experience and of advanced culture; with his contemporaries, however, such culture was so far from harmonious that this fact rather raises than lowers his individual status. The final impression given by these works is admiration for the poet's talent, mingled with regret that

CLANNESSE AND PACIENCE.

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he did not belong to a more truly epic age, or to an age that would have yielded a fitter art-style to his richer and more delicate feeling.

He uses the alliterative long line in both poems, without strophic division or rhyme. His language has, therefore, an evener and broader flow, and becomes more distinctly epic. The inner cast of these poems also betokens the artist able to group masses. This grouping has more complex proportion in Clannesse, where three epic subjects alternate: the deluge, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the fall of Belshazzar, the desecrator of the temple. It is simpler and severer in Pacience, where only the story of Jonah is told.

The last-named work is perhaps the writer's masterpiece. In beauty of single descriptions, it does not fall behind either Gawayne or Clannesse; it excels the latter in finish of composition and equal disposal of motives, and it excels both in the evident and more practical relation of the material to the personality of the author. He plainly portrays, in the fort. unes of Jonah, his own struggle for inward peace and subjection of will to Providence; and the prelude discloses the aging poet, who has felt the pains of poverty and privation, as well as loneliness.

These last works, too, oftentimes betray the influence of the allegorical school, most distinctly so in Clannesse where the enfant terrible of this school, Jehan de Meun, is expressly mentioned.

This name and the productions connected with it will soon confront us in studying one greater than the poet of the Gawayne.

For we are in a period that, unlike the previous one, does not force us to divide our attention among a mass of mediocre minds, but rather invites us to concentrate it upon a few great, typical figures, towering above the crowd.

III.

When the author of Gawayne wrote his Clannesse and Pacience, the alliterative measure, through the agency of another poem, had already become popular far beyond the borders of its original home.

This poetry also, in its origin, belongs to the west, and to the Welsh Marches; but despite its speech wavering between western and southern dialects, it soon left provincial literature, to enter the circle of national poetry. The author of the Visio de Petro Plowman is the oldest Middle English writer whose memory, in the broader sense, has lived to the modern age. We know the man only from his work. A doubtful and ill-substantiated tradition adds no essential feature to his portrait.

William Langland (perhaps more correctly, Langley) was born about the year 1332. He is said to have been a native of Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire. The name of his father is given as Stacy de Rokele (Rokayle) qui Stacius fuit generosus. There seems, at an early time, to have been intercourse between William's family and that of the Burnels, an eminent house in Shropshire. The Burnels had by marriage acquired the manor of Shipton-under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire, belonging to the noble family of le Spenser; Stacy de Rokele rented land connected with it, and consequently had settled in Oxfordshire with his family. William received a careful education; he doubtless attended a Latin school. That he studied at the university is not quite certain, although most probable; and if he did, we naturally think of him at Oxford. The well-grown, serious, and studious youth was evidently destined for the church, but he seems to have received only the first tonsure, thus becoming clericus, but never priest. After the death of his father and of his patron, William led a changeful life, and alone wanlered over a great part of his native country. His work shows that he came to know care and privation. But he never seems to have taken up any secular trade, nor to have tried to enter practical life. Given to study and contemplation, the activity of the world was to him a drama, which he watched with keen glance and quick sympathy, but in which he felt no call to take active part. He perhaps brought personal endeavour to bear within a narrow circle, and upon single objects, but he gained a broader field of action only as author.

His great work first presents the poet on Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. We afterwards find him married at Cornhill in London. In the last years of his life he seems