A Literary History of the English People, from the Origins to the Renaissance (part 3)

Translations begin to appear, however, which is already an improvement. Pious treatises had been early turned into English. John of Trevisa, born in Cornwall, vicar of Berkeley, translates at a running pace, with numerous errors, but in simple style, the famous Universal History, "Polychronicon," of Ralph Higden, and the scientific encyclopædia, "De Proprietatibus Rerum," of Bartholomew the Englishman. The first of these works was finished in 1387, and had at the Renaissance the honour of being printed by Caxton; the second was finished in 1398.

The English translation of the Travels of Mandeville enjoyed still greater popularity. This translation is an anonymous one. It has been found out to-day that the original text of the "Travels" was compiled in French by Jean de Bourgogne, physician, usually called John-with-the-Beard, "Joannes-ad-Barbam," who wrote various treatises, one in particular on the plague, in 1365, who died at Liège in 1372, and was buried in the church of the Guillemins, where his tomb was still to be seen at the time of the French Revolution. John seems to have invented the character of Mandeville as Swift invented Gulliver, and Defoe Robinson Crusoe. Now that his imposture is discovered, the least we can do is to acknowledge his skill: for five centuries Europe has believed in Mandeville, and the merit is all the greater, seeing that John-with-the-Beard did not content himself with merely making his hero travel to a desert island; that would have been far too simple. No, he unites beforehand a Crusoe and a Gulliver in one; it is Crusoe at Brobdingnag; the knight comes to a land of giants; he does not see the giants, it is true, but he sees their sheep (the primitive sheep of Central Asia); elsewhere the inhabitants feed on serpents and hiss as serpents do; some men have dogs' faces; others raise above their head an enormous foot, which serves them for a parasol. Gulliver was not to behold anything more strange. Still the whole was accepted with enthusiasm by the readers of the Middle Ages; with kindness and goodwill by the critics of our time. The most obvious lies were excused and even justified, and the success of the book was such that there remain about three hundred manuscript copies of it, whereas of the authentic travels of Marco Polo there exist only seventy-five. "Mandeville" had more than twenty-five editions in the fifteenth century and Marco Polo only five.

Nothing, indeed, is more cleverly persuasive than the manner in which Jean de Bourgogne introduces his hero. He is an honest man, somewhat naïve and credulous perhaps, but one who does not lack good reasons to justify if need be his credulity; he has read much, and does not hide the use he makes of others' journals; he reports what he has seen and what others have seen. For his aim is a practical one; he wants to write a guide book, and receives information from all comers. The information sometimes is very peculiar; but Pliny is the authority: who shall be believed in if Pliny is not trusted? After a description of wonders, the knight takes breathing time and says: Of course you won't believe me; nor should I have believed myself if such things had been told me, and if I had not seen them. He felt so sure of his own honesty that he challenged criticism; this disposition was even one of the causes why he had written in French: "And know you that I should have turned this booklet into Latin in order to be more brief: but for the reason that many understand better romance," that is French, "than Latin, I wrote in romance, so that everybody will be able to understand it, and that the lords, knights, and other noblemen, who know little Latin or none, and have been over the sea, perceive and understand whether I speak truth or not. And if I make mistakes in my narrative for want of memory or for any cause, they will be able to check and correct me: for things seen long ago, may be forgotten, and man's memory cannot embrace and keep everything."

And so the sail is spread, and being thus amply supplied with oratorical precautions, our imaginary knight sets out on his grand voyage of discovery through the books of his closet. Having left St. Albans to visit Jerusalem, China, the country of the five thousand islands, he journeys and sails through Pliny, Marco Polo, Odoric de Pordenone, Albert d'Aix, William of Boldensele, Pierre Comestor, Jacques de Vitry, bestiaries, tales of travels, collections of fables, books of dreams, patching together countless marvels, but yet, as he assures us, omitting many so as not to weary our faith: It would be too long to say all; "y seroit trop longe chose à tot deviser." With fanciful wonders are mingled many real ones, which served to make the rest believed in, and were gathered from well-informed authors; thus Mandeville's immense popularity served at least to vulgarise the knowledge of some curious and true facts. He describes, for example, the artificial hatching of eggs in Cairo; a tree that produces "wool" of which clothing is made, that is to say the cotton-plant; a country of Asia where it is a mark of nobility for the women to have tiny feet, on which account they are bandaged in their infancy, that they may only grow to half their natural size; the magnetic needle which points out the north to mariners; the country of the five thousand islands (Oceania); the roundness of the earth, which is such that the inhabitants of the Antipodes have their feet directly opposite to ours, and yet do not fall off into space any more than the earth itself falls there, though of much greater weight. People who start from their own country, and sail always in the same direction, finally reach a land where their native tongue is spoken: they have come back to their starting-point.

In the Middle Ages the English were already passionately fond of travels; Higden and others had, as has been seen, noted this trait of the national character. This account of adventures attributed to one of their compatriots could not fail therefore greatly to please them; they delighted in Mandeville's book; it was speedily translated, soon became one of the classics of the English language, and served, at the time of its appearance, to vulgarise in England the use of that simple and easy-going prose of which it was a model in its day, the best that had been seen till then.

Various scientific and religious treatises were also written in prose; those of Richard Rolle, hermit of Hampole, count amongst the oldest and most remarkable. We owe several to Chaucer; they pass unnoticed in the splendour of his other works, and it is only fair they should. Chaucer wrote in prose his tale of the parson, and his tale of Melibeus, both taken from the French, his translation of Boethius, and his treatise on the Astrolabe. His prose is laboured and heavy, sometimes obscure; he, whose poetical similes are so brilliant and graceful, comes to write, when he handles prose, such phrases as this: "And, right by ensaumple as the sonne is hid whan the sterres ben clustred (that is to seyn, whan sterres ben covered with cloudes) by a swifte winde that highte Chorus, and that the firmament stant derked by wete ploungy cloudes, and that the sterres nat apperen up-on hevene, so that the night semeth sprad up-on erthe: yif thanne the wind that highte Borias, y-sent out of the caves of the contree of Trace, beteth this night (that is to seyn, chaseth it a-wey, and discovereth the closed day): than shyneth Phebus y-shaken with sodein light, and smyteth with his bemes in mervelinge eyen." Chaucer, the poet, in the same period of his life, perhaps in the same year, had expressed, as we have seen, the same idea thus:

But right as whan the sonne shyneth brighte
In march that chaungeth ofte tyme his face,
And that a cloud is put with wind to flighte
Which over-sprat the sonne as for a space,
A cloudy thought gan thorugh hir soule pace,
That over-spradde hir brighte thoughtes alle.

Accustomed to poetry, Chaucer sticks fast in prose, the least obstacle stops him; he needs the blue paths of the air. High-flying birds are bad walkers.

II.

Under a different form, however, prose progressed in England during the course of the fourteenth century. This form is the oratorical.

The England of Chaucer and Langland, that poetical England whose prose took so long to come to shape, was already, as we have seen, the parliamentary England that has continued up to this day. She defended her interests, bargained with the king, listened to the speeches, sometimes very modest ones, that the prince made her, and answered by remonstrances, sometimes very audacious. The affairs of the State being even then the affairs of all, every free man discussed them; public life had developed to an extent with which nothing in Europe could be compared; even bondmen on the day of revolt were capable of assigning themselves a well-determined goal, and working upon a plan. They destroy the Savoy as a means of marking their disapprobation of John of Gaunt and his policy; but do not plunder it, so as to prove they are fighting for an idea: "So that the whole nation should know they did nothing for the love of lucre, death was decreed against any one who should dare to appropriate anything found in the palace. The innumerable gold and silver objects there would be chopped up in small pieces with a hatchet, and the pieces thrown into the Thames or the sewers; the cloths of silk and gold would be torn. And it was done so."

Many eloquent speeches were delivered at this time, vanished words, the memory of which is lost; the most impassioned, made on heaths or in forest glades, are only known to us by their results: these burning words called armed men out of the earth. These speeches were in English; no text of them has been handed down to us; of one, however, the most celebrated of all, we have a Latin summary; it is the famous English harangue made at Blackheath, by the rebel priest, John Ball, at the time of the taking of London.

Under a quieter form, which might already be called the "parliamentary" form, but often with astonishing boldness and eloquence, public interests are discussed during this century, but nearly always in French at the palace of Westminster. There, documents abound; the Rolls of Parliament, an incomparable treasure, have come down to us, and nothing is easier than to attend, if so inclined, a session in the time of the Plantagenets. Specimens of questions and answers, of Government speeches and speeches of the Opposition, have been preserved. Moreover, some of the buildings where these scenes took place still exist to-day.

First of all, and before the opening of the session, a "general proclamation" was read in the great hall of Westminster, that hall built by William Rufus, the woodwork of which was replaced by Richard II., and that has been lately cleared of its cumbrous additions. This proclamation forbids each and all to come to the place where Parliament sits, "armed with hoquetons, armor, swords, and long knives or other sorts of weapons;" for such serious troubles have been the result of this wearing of arms that business has been impeded, and the members of Parliament have been "effreietz," frightened, by these long knives. Then, descending to lesser things, the proclamation goes on to forbid the street-boys of London to play at hide-and-seek in the palace, or to perform tricks on the passers-by, such as "to twitch off their hoods" for instance, which the proclamation in parliamentary style terms improper games, "jues nient covenables." But as private liberty should be respected as much as possible, this prohibition is meant only for the duration of the session.

On the day of the opening the king repairs to the place of the sittings, where he not unfrequently finds an empty room, many of the members or of the "great" having been delayed on the way by bad weather, bad roads, or other impediments. Another day is then fixed upon for the solemn opening of the business.

All being at last assembled, the king, the lords spiritual and temporal and the Commons, meet together in the "Painted Chamber." The Chancellor explains the cause of the summons, and the questions to be discussed. This is an opportunity for a speech, and we have the text of a good many of them. Sometimes it is a simple, clear, practical discourse, enumerating, without any studied phrases or pompous terms, the points that are to be treated; sometimes it is a flowery and pretentious oration, adorned with witticisms and quotations, and compliments addressed to the king, as is for instance the speech (in French) of the bishop of St. David's, Adam Houghton, Chancellor of England in 1377:

"Lords and Gentlemen, I have orders from my lord the Prince here present, whom God save," the youthful Richard, heir to the throne, "to expound the reason why this Parliament was summoned. And true it is that the wise suffer and desire to hear fools speak, as is affirmed by St. Paul in his Epistles, for he saith: Libenter suffertis insipientes cum sitis ipsi sapientes. And in as much as you are wise and I am a fool, I understand that you wish to hear me speak. And another cause there is, which will rejoice you if you are willing to hear me. For the Scripture saith that every messenger bringing glad tidings, must be always welcome; and I am a messenger that bringeth you good tidings, wherefore I must needs be welcome."

All these pretty things are to convey to them that the king, Edward III., then on the brink of the grave, is not quite so ill, which should be a cause of satisfaction for his subjects. Another cause of joy, for everything seems to be considered as such by the worthy bishop, is this illness itself; "for the Scripture saith: Quos diligo castigo, which proves that God him loves, and that he is blessed of God." The king is to be a "vessel of grace," vas electionis. The Chancellor continues thus at length, heedless of the fact that the return of Alice Perrers to the old king belies his Biblical applications.

Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was to die such a dreadful death, from the eighth blow of the axe, after having lost the hand which he carried to the first wound, spoke in much the same style. He opened in these terms the first parliament of Richard II.:

"Rex tuus venit tibi.—Lords and Gentlemen, the words which I have spoken signify in French: Your king comes to thee.—And thereupon, the said archbishop gave several good reasons agreeing with his subject, and divided his said subject in three parts, as though it had been a sermon."

In truth it is a sermon; the Gospel is continually quoted, and serves for unexpected comparisons. The youthful Richard has come to Parliament, just as the Blessed Virgin went to see St. Elizabeth; the joy is the same: "Et exultavit infans in utero ejus."

Fortunately, all did not lose themselves in such flowery mazes. William Thorpe, William of Shareshull, William of Wykeham, John Knyvet, &c., make business-like speeches, simple, short, and to the point: "My Lords, and you of the Commons," says Chancellor Knyvet, "you well know how after the peace agreed upon between our lord the King and his adversaries of France, and openly infringed by the latter, the king sent soldiers and nobles across the sea to defend us, which they do, but are hard pressed by the enemy. If they protect us, we must help them."

The reasoning is equally clear in Wykeham's speeches, and with the same skill he makes it appear as if the Commons had a share in all the king's actions: "Gentlemen, you well know how, in the last Parliament, the king, with your consent, again took the title of King of France...."

These speeches being heard, and the "receivers" and "triers" of petitions having been appointed, the two houses divided, and deliberated apart from each other; the Lords retired "to the White Chamber"; the Commons remained "in the Painted Chamber." At other times "the said Commons were told to withdraw by themselves to their old place in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey," that beautiful Chapter House still in existence, which had been built under Henry III.

Then the real debates began, interrupted by the most impassioned speeches. They were not reported, and only a faint echo has reached us. Traces of the sentiments which animated the Commons are found, however, in the petitions they drew up, which were like so many articles of the bargains contracted by them. For they did not allow themselves to be carried away by the eloquent and tender speeches of the Government orators; they were practical and cold-blooded; they agreed to make concessions provided concessions were made to them, and they added an annulling clause in case the king refused: "In case the conditions are not complied with, they shall not be obliged to grant the aid." The discussions are long and minute in both houses; members do not meet for form's sake; decisions are not lightly taken: "Of which things," we read in the Rolls, "they treated at length." In another case, the Commons, from whom a ready-made answer was expected, announce that "they wish to talk together," and they continue to talk from the 24th of January to the 19th of February. Only too glad was the Government when the members did not declare "that they dare not assent without discussing the matter with the Commons of their shire," that is to say, without consulting their constituents. And this they do, though William de la Pole and others, sent "by our lord the king from thence (that is from France) as envoys," had modestly explained the urgency of the case, and "the cause of the long stay the king had made in these aforesaid parts, without riding against his enemies," this cause being lack of money.

When the Commons have at last come to a decision, they make it known in the presence of the Lords through the medium of their Speaker, or, as he was called in the French of the period, the one who had the words for them: "Qui avoit les paroles pur les Communes d'Engleterre en cest Parlement." In these replies especially, and in the petitions presented at the same time, are found traces of the vehemence displayed in the Chapter House. The boldness of the answers and of the remonstrances is extraordinary, and from their tone can be conceived with what power and freedom civil eloquence, of which England has since produced so many admirable specimens, displayed itself, even at that distant epoch.

The most remarkable case is that of the Good Parliament of 1376, in which, after having deliberated apart, the Commons join the other house, and by the mouth of their Speaker, Peter de la Mare, bring in their bill of complaints against royalty: "And after that the aforesaid Commons came to Parliament, openly protesting that they were as willing and determined to help their noble liege lord ... as any others had ever been, in any time past.... But they said it seemed to them an undoubted fact, that if their liege lord had always had around him loyal counsellors and good officers ... our lord the king would have been very rich in treasure, and therefore would not have had such great need of burdening his Commons, either with subsidy, talliage, or otherwise...." A special list of grievances is drawn up against the principal prevaricators; their names are there, and their crimes; the king's mistress, Alice Perrers, is not forgotten. Then follow the petitions of the Commons, the number of which is enormous, a hundred and forty in all, in which abuses are pointed out one by one.

Formerly, say the Commons, "bishoprics, as well as other benefices of Holy Church, used to be, after true elections, in accordance with saintly considerations and pure charity, assigned to people found to be worthy of clerical promotion, men of clean life and holy behaviour, whose intention it was to stay on their benefices, there to preach, visit, and shrive their parishioners.... And so long as these good customs were observed, the realm was full of all sorts of prosperity, of good people and loyal, good clerks and clergy, two things that always go together...." The encroachments of the See of Rome in England are, for all right-minded people, "great subject of sorrow and of tears." Cursed be the "sinful city of Avignon," where simony reigns, so that "a sorry fellow who knows nothing of what he ought and is worthless" will receive a benefice of the value of a thousand marcs, "when a doctor of decree and a master of divinity will be only too glad to secure some little benefice of the value of twenty marcs." The foreigners who are given benefices in England "will never see their parishioners ... and more harm is done to Holy Church by such bad Christians than by all the Jews and Saracens in the world.... Be it again remembered that God has committed his flock to the care of our Holy Father the Pope, that they might be fed and not shorn." The Commons fear nothing; neither king nor Pope could make them keep silence. In their mind the idea begins to dawn that the kingdom is theirs, and the king too; they demand that Richard, heir to the throne, shall be brought to them; they wish to see him; and he is shown to them.

In spite of the progress made by the English language, French continued to be used at Westminster. It remained as a token of power and an emblem of authority, just as modern castles are still built with towers, though not meant to be defended by cannon. It was a sign, and this sign has subsisted, since the formula by which the laws are ratified is still in French at the present time. English, nevertheless, began to make an appearance even at Westminster. From 1363, the opening speeches are sometimes in English; in 1399, the English tongue was used in the chief acts and discourses relating to the deposition of Richard. On Monday, the 29th of September, the king signed his act of resignation; on the following day a solemn meeting of Parliament took place, in presence of all the people, in Westminster Hall; the ancient throne containing Jacob's stone, brought from Scotland by Edward I., and which can still be seen in the abbey, had been placed in the hall, and covered with cloth of gold, "cum pannis auri." Richard's act of resignation was read "first in Latin, then in English," and the people showed their approbation of the same by applause. Henry then came forward, claimed the kingdom, in English, and seated himself on the throne, in the midst of the acclamations of those present. The Archbishop of Canterbury delivered an oration, and the new king, speaking again, offered his thanks in English to "God, and yowe Spirituel and Temporel, and alle the Astates of the lond." There is no more memorable sign of the changes that had taken place than the use made of the English language on an occasion like this, by a prince who had no title to the crown but popular favour.

III.

All these translators were necessarily wanting in originality (less, however, than they need have been), and all these orators spoke for the most part in French. In their hands, English prose could not be perfected to a very high degree. It progressed, however, owing to them, but owing much more to an important personage, who made common English his fighting weapon, John Wyclif, to whom the title of "Father of English prose" rightfully belongs, now that Mandeville has dissolved in smoke. Wyclif, Langland, and Chaucer are the three great figures of English literature in the Middle Ages.

Wyclif belonged to the rich and respected family of the Wyclifs, lords of the manor of Wyclif, in Yorkshire. He was born about 1320, and devoted himself early to a scientific and religious calling. He studied at Oxford, where he soon attracted notice, being one of those men of character who occupy from the beginning of their lives, without seeking for it, but being, as it seems, born to it, a place apart, amid the limp multitude of men. The turn of his mind, the originality of his views, the firmness of his will, his learning, raised him above others; he was one of those concerning whom it is at once said they are "some one;" and several times in the course of his existence he saw the University, the king, the country even, turn to him when "some one" was needed.

He was hardly thirty-five when, the college of Balliol at Oxford having lost its master, he was elected to the post. In 1366 Parliament ruled that the Pope's claim to the tribute promised by King John should no longer be recognised, and Wyclif was asked to draw up a pamphlet justifying the decision. In 1374 a diplomatic mission was entrusted to him, and he went to Bruges, with several other "ambassatores," to negotiate with the Pope's representatives. He then had the title of doctor of divinity.

Various provincial livings were successively bestowed upon him: that of Fillingham in 1361; that of Ludgarshall in 1368; that of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, in 1374, which he kept till his death. He divided his time between his duties as rector, his studies, his lectures at Oxford, and his life in London, where he made several different stays, and preached some of his sermons.

These quiet occupations were interrupted from time to time owing to the storms raised by his writings. But so great was his fame, and so eminent his personality, that he escaped the terrible consequences that heresy then involved. He had at first alarmed religious authority by his political theories on the relations of Church and State, next on the reformation of the Church itself; finally he created excessive scandal by attacking dogmas and by discussing the sacraments. Summoned the first time to answer in respect of his doctrines, he appeared in St. Paul's, in 1377, attended by the strange patrons that a common animosity against the high dignitaries of the Church had gained for him; John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and Lord Henry Percy accompanied him. The duke, little troubled by scruples, loudly declared, in the middle of the church, that he would drag the bishop out of the cathedral by the hair of his head. These words were followed by an indescribable tumult. Indignant at this insult, the people of the City drove the duke from the church, pursued him through the town, and laid siege to the house of John of Ypres, a rich merchant with whom he had gone to sup. Luckily for the prince, the house opened on the Thames. He rose in haste, knocking his legs against the table, and, without stopping to drink the cordial offered him, slipped into a boat and fled, as fast as oars could carry him, to his sister-in-law's, the Princess of Wales, at Kennington. The summoning of Wyclif thus had no result.

But the Pope, in the same year, launched against the English theologian bulls pointing out eighteen erroneous propositions contained in his writings, and enjoining that the culprit should be put in prison if he refused to retract. The University of Oxford, being already a power at that time, proud of its privileges, jealous in maintaining solidarity between its members, imbued with those ideas of opposition to the Pope which were increasing in England, considered the decree as an excessive exercise of authority. It examined the propositions, and declared them to be orthodox, though capable of wrong interpretations, on which account Wyclif should go to London and explain himself.

He is found, therefore, in London in the beginning of 1378; the bishops are assembled in the still existing chapel of Lambeth Palace. But by one of those singularities that allow us to realise how the limits of the various powers were far from being clearly defined, it happened that the bishops had received positive orders not to condemn Wyclif. The prohibition proceeded from a woman, the Princess of Wales, widow of the Black Prince. The prelates, however, were spared the trouble of choosing between the Pope and the lady; for the second time Wyclif was saved by a riot; a crowd favourable to his ideas invaded the palace, and no sentence could be given. Any other would have appeared the more guilty; he only lived the more respected. He was then at the height of his popularity; a new public statement that he had just issued in favour of the king against the Pope had confirmed his reputation as advocate and defender of the kingdom of England.

He resumed, therefore, in peace his work of destruction, and began to attack dogmas. Besides his writings and his speeches, he used, in order to popularise his doctrines, his "simple priests," or "poor priests," who, without being formed into a religious order, imitated the wandering life of the friars, but not their mendicity, and strove to attain the ideal which the friars had fallen short of. They went about preaching from village to village, and the civil authority was alarmed by the political and religious theories expounded to the people by these wanderers, who journeyed "from county to county, and from town to town, in certain habits under dissimulation of great holiness, without license of our Holy Father the Pope, or of the ordinary of the diocese." Wyclif justified these unlicensed preachings by the example of St. Paul, who, after his conversion, "preechide fast, and axide noo leve of Petir herto, for he hadde leve of Jesus Crist."

From this time forth Wyclif began to circulate on the sacraments, and especially on the Eucharist, opinions that Oxford even was unable to tolerate; the University condemned them. Conformably to his own theory, which tended, as did that of the Commons, towards a royal supremacy, Wyclif appealed not to the Pope but to the king, and in the meantime refused to submit. This was carrying boldness very far. John of Gaunt separates from his protégé; Courtenay, bishop of London, calls together a Council which condemns Wyclif and his adherents (1382); the followers are pursued, and retract or exile themselves; but Wyclif continues to live in perfect quiet. Settled at Lutterworth, from whence he now rarely stirred, he wrote more than ever, with a more and more caustic and daring pen. The papal schism, which had begun in 1378, had cast discredit on the Holy See; Wyclif's work was made the easier by it. At last Urban VI., the Pope whom England recognised, summoned him to appear in his presence, but an attack of paralysis came on, and Wyclif died in his parish on the last day of the year 1384. "Organum diabolicum, hostis Ecclesiæ, confusio vulgi, hæreticorum idolum, hypocritarum speculum, schismatis incentor, odii seminator, mendacii fabricator": such is the funeral oration inscribed in his annals, at this date, by Thomas Walsingham, monk of St. Albans. By order of the Council of Constance, his ashes were afterwards thrown to the winds, and the family of the Wyclifs of Wyclif, firmly attached to the old faith, erased him from their genealogical tree. When the Reformation came, the family remained Catholic, and this adherence to the Roman religion seems to have been the cause of its decay: "The last of the Wyclifs was a poor gardener, who dined every Sunday at Thorpe Hall, as the guest of Sir Marmaduke Tunstall, on the strength of his reputed descent."

IV.

Wyclif had begun early to write, using at first only Latin. Innumerable treatises of his exist, many of which are still unpublished, written in a Latin so incorrect and so English in its turns that "often the readiest way of understanding an obscure passage is to translate it into English." He obviously attracted the notice of his contemporaries, not by the elegance of his style, but by the power of his thought.

His thought deserved the attention it received. His mind was, above all, a critical one, opposed to formulas, to opinions without proofs, to traditions not justified by reason. Precedents did not overawe him, the mysterious authority of distant powers had no effect on his feelings. He liked to look things and people in the face, with a steady gaze, and the more important the thing was and the greater the authority claimed, the less he felt disposed to cast down his eyes.

Soon he wished to teach others to open theirs, and to see for themselves. By "others" he meant every one, and not only clerks or the great. He therefore adopted the language of every one, showing himself in that a true Englishman, a partisan of the system of free investigation, so dear since to the race. He applied this doctrine to all that was then an object of faith, and step by step, passing from the abstract to the concrete, he ended by calling for changes, very similar to those England adopted at the Reformation, and later on in the time of the Puritans.

His starting-point was as humble and abstract as his conclusions were, some of them, bold and practical. A superhuman ideal had been proposed by St. Francis to his disciples; they were to possess nothing, but beg their daily bread and help the poor. Such a rule was good for apostles and angels; it was practised by men. They were not long able to withstand the temptation of owning property, and enriching themselves; in the fourteenth century their influence was considerable, and their possessions immense. Thin subterfuges were resorted to in order to justify this change: they had only the usufruct of their wealth, the real proprietor being the Pope. From that time two grave questions arose and were vehemently discussed in Christendom: What should be thought of the poverty and mendicity of Christ and his apostles? What is property, and what is the origin of the power whence it proceeds?

In the first rank of the combatants figured, in the fourteenth century, an Englishman, Richard Fitzralph, archbishop of Armagh, "Armachanus," who studied the question of property, and contested the theory of the friars in various sermons and treatises, especially in his work: "De pauperie Salvatoris," composed probably between 1350 and 1356.

Wyclif took his starting-point from the perfectly orthodox writings of Fitzralph, and borrowed from him nearly the whole of his great theory of "Dominium," or lordship, power exercised either over men, or over things, domination, property, possession. But he carried his conclusions much farther, following the light of logic, as was the custom of schools, without allowing himself to be hindered by the radicalism of the consequences and the material difficulties of the execution.

The theory of "Dominium," adopted and popularised by Wyclif, is an entirely feudal one. According to him, all lordship comes from God; the Almighty bestows it on man as a fief, in consideration of a service or condition the keeping of His commandments. Deadly sin breaks the contract, and deprives the tenant of his right to the fief; therefore no man in a state of deadly sin possesses any of the lordships called property, priesthood, royalty, magistracy. All which is summed up by Wyclif in his proposition: any "dominium" has grace for its foundation. By such a theory, the whole social order is shaken; neither Pope nor king is secure on his throne, nor priest in his living, nor lord in his estate.

The confusion is all the greater from the fact that a multitude of other subversive conclusions are appended to this fundamental theory: While sinners lose all lordship, the good possess all lordship; to man, in a state of "gratia gratificante," belongs the whole of what comes from God; "in re habet omnia bona Dei." But how can that be? The easiest thing in the world, replies Wyclif, whom nothing disturbs: all goods should be held in common, "Ergo omnia debent esse communia"; wives should be alone excepted.—The Bible is a kind of Koran in which everything is found; no other law should be obeyed save that one alone; civil and canonical laws are useless if they agree with the Bible, and criminal if they are opposed to it.—Royalty is not the best form of government; an aristocratic system is better, similar to that of the Judges in Israel.—Neither heirship nor popular election is sufficient for the transmission of the crown; grace is needed besides.—The bequeathing to the Church of estates which will become mortmain lands is inadmissible: "No one can transmit more rights than he possesses, and no one is personally possessed of rights of civil lordship extending beyond the term of life."—If the convent or the priest make a bad use of their wealth, the temporal power will be doing "a very meritorious thing" in depriving them of it.

The whole order of things is unhinged, and we are nearing chaos. It is going so far that Wyclif cannot refrain from inserting some of those slight restrictions which the logicians of the Middle Ages were fond of slipping into their writings. In time of danger this was the secret door by which they made their escape, turning away from the stake. Wyclif is an advocate of communism; but he gives to understand that it is not for now; it is a distant ideal. After us the deluge! Not so, answer the peasants of 1381; the deluge at once: "Omnia debent esse communia!"

If all lordship vanishes through sin, who shall be judge of the sin of others? All real lordship vanishes from the sinner, answered Wyclif, but there remains to him, by the permission of God, a power de facto, that it is not given us to remove; evil triumphs, but with God's consent; the Christian must obey the wicked king and bishop: "Deus debet obedire diabolo." But the dissatisfied only adopted the first part of the theory, and instead of submitting to Simon Sudbury, their archbishop, of whom they disapproved, they cut off his head.

These were certainly extreme and exceptional consequences, to which Wyclif only contributed in a slight measure. The lasting and permanent result of the doctrine was to strengthen the Commons of England in the aim they already had in view, namely, to diminish the authority exercised over them by the Pope, and to loosen the ties that bound the kingdom to Rome. Wyclif pointed out that, contrary to the theory of Boniface VIII. (bull "Unam Sanctam"), there does not exist in this world one single supreme and unequalled sovereignty; the Pope is not the sole depositary of divine power. Since all lordship proceeds from God, that of the king comes from Him, as well as that of the Pope; kings themselves are "vikeris of God"; beside the Pope, and not below him, there is the king.

V.

The English will thus be sole rulers in their island. They must also be sole keepers of their consciences, and for that Wyclif is to teach them free investigation. All, then, must understand him; and he begins to write in English. His English works are numerous; sermons, treatises, translations; they fill volumes.

Before all the Book of truth was to be placed in the hands of everybody, so that none need accept without check the interpretations of others. With the help of a few disciples, Wyclif began to translate the Bible into English. To translate the Scriptures was not forbidden. The Church only required that the versions should be submitted to her for approval. There already existed several, complete or partial, in various languages; a complete one in French, written in the thirteenth century, and several partial ones in English. Wyclif's version includes the whole of the canonical books, and even the apocryphal ones; the Gospels appear to have been translated by himself, the Old Testament chiefly by his disciple, Nicholas of Hereford. The task was an immense one, the need pressing; the work suffered from the rapidity with which it was performed. A revision of the work of Nicholas was begun under Wyclif's direction, but only finished after his death.

No attempt at elegance is found in this translation; the language is rugged, and on that account the better adapted to the uncouthness of the holy Word. Harsh though it be we feel, however, that it is tending towards improvement; the meaning of the words becomes more precise, owing to the necessity of giving to the sacred phrases their exact signification; the effort is not always successful, but it is a continued one, and it is an effort in the right direction. It was soon perceived to what need the undertaking answered. Copies of the work multiplied in astonishing fashion. In spite of the wholesale destruction which was ordered, there remain a hundred and seventy manuscripts, more or less complete, of Wyclif's Bible. For some time, it is true, the copying of it had not been opposed by the ecclesiastical authority, and the version was only condemned twenty-four years after the death of the author, by the Council of Oxford. In the England of the Plantagenets could be foreseen the England of the Tudors, under whom three hundred and twenty-six editions of the Bible were printed in less than a century, from 1525 to 1600.

But Wyclif's greatest influence on the development of prose was exercised by means of his sermons and treatises. In these, the reformer gives himself full scope; he alters his tone at need, employs all means, from the most impassioned eloquence down to the most trivial pleasantry, meant to delight men of the lower class. Put to such varied uses, prose could not but become a more workable instrument. True it is that Wyclif never seeks after artistic effect in his English, any more than in his Latin. His sermons regularly begin by: "This gospel tellith.... This gospel techith alle men that ..." and he continues his arguments in a clear and measured style, until he comes to one of those burning questions about which he is battling; then his irony bursts forth, he uses scathing similes; he thunders against those "emperoure bishopis," taken up with worldly cares; his speech is short and haughty; he knows how to condense his whole theory in one brief, clear-cut phrase, easy to remember, that every one will know by heart, and which it will not be easy to answer. Why are the people preached to in a foreign tongue? Christ, when he was with his apostles, "taughte hem oute this prayer, bot be thou syker, nother in Latyn nother in Frensche, bot in the langage that they usede to speke." How should popes be above kings? "Thus shulden popis be suget to kynges, for thus weren bothe Crist and Petre." How believe in indulgences sold publicly by pardoners on the market-places, and in that inexhaustible "treasury" of merits laid up in heaven that the depositaries of papal favour are able to distribute at their pleasure among men for money? Each merit is rewarded by God, and consequently the benefit of it cannot be applicable to any one who pays: "As Peter held his pees in grauntinge of siche thingis, so shulden thei holden ther pees, sith thei ben lasse worth than Petir."

Next to these brief arguments are familiar jests, gravely uttered, with scarcely any perceptible change in the expression of the lips, jests that Englishmen have been fond of in all times. If he is asked of what use are the "letters of fraternity," sold by the friars to their customers, to give them a share in the superabundant merits of the whole order, Wyclif replies with a serious air: "Bi siche resouns thinken many men that this lettris mai do good for to covere mostard pottis."

It is difficult to follow him in all the places where he would fain lead us. He terrified the century by the boldness of his touch; when he was seen to shake the frail holy thing with a ruthless hand, all eyes turned away, and his former protectors withdrew from him. He did not, however, carry his doubt to the extreme end; according to his doctrine the substance of the host, the particle of matter, is not the matter itself, the living flesh of the body that Jesus Christ had on earth; this substance is bread; only by a miracle which is the effect of consecration, the body of Christ is present sacramentally; that is to say, all the benefits, advantages, and virtues which emanate from it are attached to the host as closely as the soul of men is united to their body.

The other sacraments, ecclesiastical hierarchy, the tithes collected by the clergy, are not more respectfully treated by him. These criticisms and teachings had all the more weight owing to the fact that they were delivered from a pulpit and fell from the lips of an authorised master, whose learning was acknowledged even by his adversaries: "A very eminent doctor, a peerless and incomparable one," says Knighton. Still better than Langland's verses, his forcible speech, by reason of his station, prepared the way for the great reforms of the sixteenth century. He already demands the confiscation of the estates of the monasteries, accomplished later by Henry VIII.; he appeals at every page of his treatises to the secular arm, hoping by its means to bring back humility by force into the heart of prelates.

But he is so far removed from its realisation that his dream dazzles him, and urges him on to defend chimerical schemes. He wishes the wealth of the clergy to be taken from them and bestowed upon poor, honest, brave, trustworthy gentlemen, who will defend the country; and he does not perceive that these riches would have fallen principally into the hands of turbulent and grasping courtiers, as happened in the sixteenth century. He is carried away by his own reasonings, so that the Utopian or paradoxical character of his statements escape him. Wanting to minimise the power of the popes, he protests against the rules followed for their election, and goes on to say concerning the vote by ballot: "Sith ther ben fewe wise men, and foolis ben without noumbre, assent of more part of men makith evydence that it were foli."

His disciples, Lollards as they were usually called, a name the origin of which has been much discussed, survived him, and his simple priests continued, for a time, to propagate his doctrines. The master's principal propositions were even found one day in 1395, posted up on the door of St. Paul's Cathedral, in the heart of London. Among them figure declarations that, at a distance of three centuries, seem a foreshadowing of the theories of the Puritans; one for instance, affirming "that the multitude of useless arts allowed in the kingdom are the cause of sins without number." Among the forbidden arts are included that of the goldsmiths, and another art of which, however, the Puritans were to make a somewhat notorious use, that of the armorers.

At the University, the followers of Wyclif were numerous; in the country they continued to increase until the end of the fourteenth century. Energetic measures were adopted in the beginning of the fifteenth; the statute "De hæretico comburendo" was promulgated in 1401 (but rarely applied at this period); the master's books were condemned and prohibited; from that time Wyclifism declined, and traces of its survival can hardly be found at the period when the Reformation was introduced into England.

By a strange fate Wyclif's posterity continued to flourish out of the kingdom. Bohemia had just given a queen to England, and used to send students every year from its University of Prague to study at Paris and Oxford. In that country the Wyclifite tenets found a multitude of adepts; the Latin works of the thinker were transcribed by Czech students, and carried back to their own land; several writings of Wyclif exist only in Czech copies. His most illustrious disciple, John Hus, rector of the University of Prague, was burnt at the stake, by order of the Council of Constance, on the 6th of July, 1415. But the doctrine survived; it was adopted with modifications by the Taborites and the Moravian Brethren, and borrowed from them by the Waldenses; the same Moravian Brethren who, owing to equally singular vicissitudes, were to become an important factor in the English religious movement of the eighteenth century: the Wesleyan movement. In spite of differences in their doctrines, the Moravian Brethren and the Hussites stand as a connecting link between Wesley and Wyclif.

CHAPTER VI.

THE STAGE.

I.

Dramatic art, in which the English people was to find one of the most brilliant of its literary glories, was evolved slowly from distant and obscure origins.

In England, as in the rest of Europe, the sources of modern drama were of two sorts: there were civil and religious sources.

The desire for amusement and the craving for laughable things never disappeared entirely, even in the darkest days; the sources of the lay drama began to spring and flow, owing to no other cause. The means formerly employed to amuse and raise a laugh cannot be expected to have shown much refinement. No refinement was to be found in them, and all means were considered good which ensured success; kicks were among the simplest and oftenest resorted to, but not at all among the grossest; others were worse, and were much more popular. Let us not wonder overmuch: some of them have recovered again, quite recently, a part of their pristine popularity. They were used by jugglers or players, "joculatores," nomadic sometimes, and sometimes belonging to the household of the great. The existence of such men is testified to from century to century, during the whole of the Middle Ages, mainly by the blame and condemnation they constantly incurred: and so it is that the best information concerning these men is not to be sought for in the monuments of the gay literature, but rather in pious treatises and in the acts of Councils.

Treatises and Councils, however, might to our advantage have been even more circumstantial; the pity is that they, naturally enough, consider it below their dignity to descend to very minute particulars; it is enough for them to give an enumeration, and to condemn in one phrase all the mimes, tumblers, histrions, wrestlers, and the rest of the juggling troup. Sometimes, however, a few particulars are added; the peculiar tricks and the scandalous practices of the ill-famed race are mentioned; and an idea can thus be formed of our ancestors' amusements. John of Salisbury in the twelfth century alludes to a variety of pastimes, and while protesting against the means used to produce laughter, places them on record: a heavy laughter indeed, noisy and tumultuous, Rabelais' laughter before Rabelais. Of course, "such a modest hilarity as an honest man would allow himself" is not to be reproved, and John did not forbear to use this moderate way of enjoyment; but the case is different with the jugglers and tumblers: "much better it would be for them to do nothing than to act so wickedly."

No doubt was possible. The jesters did not care in the least to keep within the bounds of "a modest hilarity"; nor did their audience, for in the fourteenth century we find these men described in the poem of Langland, and they have not altered in any way; their tricks are the same, the same shameful exhibitions take place with the same success; for two hundred years they have been laughed at without intermission. Many things have come and gone; the nation has got tired of John's tyranny, of Henry the Third's weakness, of the Pope's supremacy, but the histrions continue to tumble and jump; "their points being broken, down fall their hose," (to use Shakespeare's words), and the great at Court are convulsed with laughter on their benches.

Besides their horseplay, jugglers and histrions had, to please their audience, retorts, funny answers, witticisms, merry tales, which they acted rather than told, for gestures accompanied the delivery. This part of the amusement, which came nearest the drama, sharp repartees, impromptu dialogues, is the one we know least about. Voices have long been silent, and the great halls which heard them are now but ivy-clad ruins, yielding no echo. Some idea, however, can be formed of what took place.

First we know from innumerable testimonies that those histrions spoke and told endless nonsense; they have been often enough reproached with it for no doubt to remain as to their talking. Then there is superabundant proof of the relish with which men enjoyed, in the Middle Ages, silly, teazing or puzzling answers; the questioner remaining at the end rolled up in the repartees, gasping as a fly caught in a spider's web. The Court fool or buffoon had for his principal merit his clever knack of returning witty or confusing answers; the best of them were preserved; itinerant minstrels remembered and repeated them; clerks turned them into Latin, and gave them place in their collections of exempla. They afforded amusement for a king, an amusement of a mixed sort, sometimes:

—Why, says the king, are there no longer any Rolands?—Because, the fool answers, there are no longer any Charlemagnes.

Walter Map, as we saw, was so fond of happy answers that he formed a book of all those he heard, knew, or made in his day. The fabliau of the "Jongleur d'Ely," written in England in the thirteenth century, is a good specimen of the word-fencing at which itinerant amusers were expert. The king is unable to draw from the jongleur any answer to any purpose: What is his name?—The name of his father.—Whom does he belong to?—To his lord.—How is this river called?—No need to call it; it comes of its own accord.—Does the jongleur's horse eat well?—"Certainly yes, my sweet good lord, he can eat more oats in a day than you would do in a whole week."

This is a mere sample of an art that lent itself to many uses, and to which belonged debates, "estrifs," "disputoisons," "jeux-partis," equally popular in England and in France. Some specimens of it are as old as the time of the Anglo-Saxons, such as the "Dialogue of Salomon and Saturnus." There are found in the English language debates or dialogues between the Owl and Nightingale, thirteenth century; the Thrush and Nightingale; the Fox and Wolf, time of Edward I.; the Carpenter's Tools, and others. Collections of silly answers were also made in England; one of them was composed to the confusion of the inhabitants of Norfolk; another in their honour and for their defence. The influence of those estrifs, or debates, on the development of the drama cannot be doubted; the oldest dramatic fragment in the English language is nothing but an estrif between Christ and Satan. The author acknowledges it himself:

A strif will I tellen on,

says he in his prologue.

Debates enjoyed great favour in castle halls; impromptu ones which, as Cathos and Madelon said, centuries later, "exerçaient les esprits de l'assemblée," were greatly liked; they constituted a sort of society game, one of the oldest on record. A person among those present was chosen to answer questions, and the amusement consisted in putting or returning questions and answers of the most unexpected or puzzling character. This was called the game of the "King who does not lie," or the game of the "King and Queen." By a phenomenon which has been observed in less remote periods, after-dinner conversations often took a licentious turn; in those games love was the subject most willingly discussed, and it was not as a rule treated from a very ethereal point of view; young men and young ladies exchanged on those occasions observations the liberty of which gave umbrage to the Church, who tried to interfere; bishops in their Constitutions mentioned those amusements, and forbade to their flock such unbecoming games as "ludos de Rege et Regina;" Walter de Chanteloup, bishop of Worcester, did so in 1240. Some of that freedom of speech survived, however, through the Middle Ages up to the time of Shakespeare; while listening to the dialogues of Beatrix and Benedick one wonders sometimes whether they are not playing the game "de Rege et Regina."

Parody also helped in its way to the formation of the drama. There was a taste for masking, for the imitation of other people; for the caricaturing of some grave person or of some imposing ceremony, mass for example, for the reproduction of the song of birds or the noise of a storm, gestures being added to the noise, the song, or the words. Some jugglers excelled in this; they were live gargoyles and were paid "the one to play the drunkard, another the fool, a third to imitate the cat." The great minstrels, "grans menestreus," had a horror of those gargoyles, the shame of their profession; noblemen, however, did not share these refined, if not disinterested, feelings, and asked to their castles and freely rewarded the members of the wandering tribe who knew how to imitate the drunkard, the fool, or the cat.

On histrionic liberties introduced even into church services, Aelred, abbot of Rievaulx in the twelfth century, gives some unexpected particulars. He describes the movements and attitudes of certain chanters by which they "resembled actors": so that we thus get information on both at the same time. Chanters are found in various churches, he says, who with inflated cheeks imitate the noise of thunder, and then murmur, whisper, allow their voice to expire, keeping their mouth open, and think that they give thus an idea of the death or ecstasy of martyrs. Now you would think you hear the neighing of horses, now the voice of a woman. With this "all their body is agitated by histrionic movements"; their lips, their shoulders, their fingers are twisted, shrugged, or spread out as they think best to suit their delivery. The audience, filled with wonder and admiration at those inordinate gesticulations, at length bursts into laughter: "It seems to them they are at the play and not at church, and that they have only to look and not to pray."

The transition from these various performances to little dramas or interludes, which were at first nothing but tales turned into dialogues, was so natural that it could scarcely attract any notice. Few specimens have survived; one English one, however, is extant, dating from the time of Edward I., and shows that this transition had then taken place. It consists in the dramatising of one of the most absurd and most popular tales told by wandering minstrels, the story, namely, of the Weeping Bitch. A woman or maid rejects the love of a clerk; an old woman (Dame Siriz in the English prose text) calls upon the proud one, having in her hands a little bitch whom she has fed with mustard, and whose eyes accordingly weep. The bitch, she says, is her own daughter, so transformed by a clerk who had failed to touch her heart; the young woman at once yields to her lover, fearing a similar fate. There exist French, Latin, and English versions of this tale, one of the few which are of undoubted Hindu origin. The English version seems to belong to the thirteenth century.

The turning of it into a drama took place a few years later. Nothing was easier; this fabliau, like many others, was nearly all in dialogues; to make a play of it, the jongleur had but to suppress some few lines of narrative; we thus have a drama, in rudimentary shape, where a deep study of human feelings must not be sought for. Here is the conversation between the young man and the young maid when they meet:

Clericus. Damishel, reste wel.

Puella. Sir, welcum, by Saynt Michel!

Clericus. Wer esty (is thy) sire, wer esty dame?

Puella. By Gode, es noner her at hame.

Clericus. Wel wor suile (such) a man to life
That suile a may (maid) mihte have to wyfe!

Puella. Do way, by Crist and Leonard....
Go forth thi way, god sire,
For her hastu losye al thi wile.

After some more supplications, the clerk, who is a student at the University, goes to old Helwis (Siriz in the prose tale) and then the author, more accustomed, it seems, to such persons than to the company of young maidens, describes with some art the hypocrisy of the matron. Helwis will not; she leads a holy life, and what is asked of her will disturb her from her pious observances. Her dignified scruples are removed at length by the plain offer of a reward.

In this way, some time before Chaucer's birth, the lay drama came into existence in Shakespeare's country.

Other stories of the same sort were also turned into plays; we have none of them, but we know that they existed. An Englishman of the fourteenth century calls the performance of them "pleyinge of japis," by opposition to the performance of religious dramas.

Other amusements again, of a strange kind, helped in the same early period to the formation of the drama. A particularly keen pleasure was afforded during the Middle Ages by songs, dances, and carols, when performed in consecrated places, such as cemeteries, cloisters, churches. A preference for such places may seem scarcely credible; still it cannot be doubted, and is besides easily explainable. To the unbridled instincts of men as yet half tamed, the Church had opposed rigorous prescriptions which were enforced wholesale. To resist excessive independence, excessive severity was needful; buttresses had to be raised equal in strength to the weight of the wall. But from time to time a cleft was formed, and the loosened passions burst forth with violence. Escaped from the bondage of discipline, men found inexpressible delight in violating all prohibitions at once; the day for the beast had come, and it challenged the angel in its turn.

The propelling power of passions so repressed was even increased by certain weird tastes very common at that period, and by the merry reactions they caused. Now oppressed by, and now in revolt against, the idea of death, the faithful would at times answer threats with sneers; they found a particular pleasure in evolving bacchanalian processions among the tombs of churchyards, not only because it was forbidden, but also on account of the awful character of the place. The watching of the dead was also an occasion for orgies and laughter. At the University, even, these same amusements were greatly liked; students delighted in singing licentious songs, wearing wreaths, carolling and deep drinking in the midst of churchyards. Councils, popes, and bishops never tired of protesting, nor the faithful of dancing. Be it forbidden, says Innocent III. at the beginning of the thirteenth century, to perform "theatrical games" in churches. Be this prohibition enforced, says Gregory IX. a little later. Be it forbidden, says Walter de Chanteloup, bishop of Worcester, to perform "dishonest games" in cemeteries and churches, especially on feast days and on the vigils of saints. Be it forbidden, says the provincial council of Scotland in 1225, "to carol and sing songs at the funeral of the dead; the tears of others ought not to be an occasion for laughter." Be it forbidden, the University of Oxford decrees in the same century, to dance and sing in churches, and wear there disguises and wreaths of flowers and leaves.

The year was divided by feasts; and those feasts, the importance of which in everybody's eyes has dwindled much, were then great events; people thought of them long before, saw them in the distance, towering above the common level of days, as cathedrals above houses Everyday life was arrested, and it was a time for rejoicings, of a religious, and sometimes of an impious, character: both kinds helped the formation of drama, and they were at times closely united On such great occasions, more than ever, the caricature and derision of holy things increased the amusement. Christmas-time had inherited the licence as well as it occupied the date of the ancient Roman saturnalia; and whatever be the period considered, be it early or late in the Middle Ages, it will be found that the anniversary was commemorated, piously and merrily, by sneering and adoring multitudes For the one did not prevent the other; people caricatured the Church, her hierarchy and ceremonials, but did not doubt her infallibility; they laughed at the devil and feared him. "Priests, deacons, and sub-deacons," says the Pope, are bold enough, on those mad days, "to take part in unbecoming bacchanals, in the presence of the people, whom they ought rather to edify by preaching the Word of God." In those bacchanals parodies of the Church prayers were introduced; a Latin hymn on the Nativity was transposed line for line, and became a song in honour of the good ale. Here, as a sample, are two stanzas, both of the original and of the parody, this last having, as it seems, been composed in England:

Letabundus
Exultet fidelis chorus,
Alleluia!
Regem Regum
Intacte perfundit thorus:
Res miranda!

Angelus consilii
Natus est de Virgine,
Sol de Stella,
Sol occasum nesciens,
Stella semper rutilans,
Semper clara.

Or i parra:
La Cerveise nos chantera
Alleluia!
Qui que en beit,
Se tele seit com estre deit,
Res miranda!

Bevez quant l'avez en poing;
Bien est droit, car mout est loing
Sol de Stella;
Bevez bien et bevez bel,
El vos vendra del tonel
Semper clara.

"You will see; the ale will make us sing, Alleluia! all of us, if the ale is as it should be, a wonderful thing! (Res miranda). Drink of it when you hold the jug; 'tis a most proper thing, for it is a good long way from sun to star (Sol de Stella); drink well! drink deep! it will flow for you from the tun, ever clear! (Semper clara)."

So rose from earth at Christmastide, borne on the same winds, angels and demons, and the ancient feast of Saturn was commemorated at the same time as Christ's. In the same way, again, the scandalous feasts of the Fools, of the Innocents, and of the Ass, were made the merrier with grotesque parodies of pious ceremonies; they were celebrated in the church itself, thus transformed, says the bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste, into a place for pleasure, amusement, and folly: God's house was defiled by the devil's inventions. He forbade, in consequence, the celebration of the feast of Fools, "festum Stultorum," on the day of Circumcision in his cathedral, and then in the whole diocese.

The feast of the Innocents was even more popular in England. The performers had at their head a "boy bishop," and this diminutive prelate presided, with mitre on his head, over the frolics of his madcap companions. The king would take an interest in the ceremony; he would order the little dignitary to be brought before him, and give him a present. Edward II. gave six shillings and eight pence to the young John, son of Allan Scroby, who had played the part of the "boy bishop" in the royal chapel; another time he gave ten shillings; Richard II., more liberal, gave a pound. Nuns even were known to forget on certain occasions their own character, and to carol with laymen on the day of the Innocents, or on the day of Mary Magdalen, to commemorate the life of their patroness, in its first part as it seems.

The passion for sightseeing, which was then very keen, and which was to be fed, later, mainly on theatrical entertainments, was indulged in during the Middle Ages in various other ways. Processions were one of them; occasions were numerous, and causes for them were not difficult to find. Had the Pui of London awarded the crown to the writer of the best chanson, a procession was formed in the streets in honour of the event. A marriage, a pilgrimage to Palestine, a patronal feast, were sufficient motives; gilds and associations donned their liveries, drew their insignia from their chest, and paraded the streets, including in the "pageant," when the circumstance allowed of it, a medley of giants and dwarfs, monsters, gilt fishes, and animals of all sorts. On grand days the town itself was transformed; with its flower-decked houses, its tapestries and hangings, it gave, with some more realism about it, the impression we receive from the painted scenery of an opera.

The town at such times was swept with extraordinary care; even "insignificant filth" was removed, Matthew Paris notes with wondering pen in 1236. The procession moved forward, men on horseback and on foot, with unfurled banners, along the decorated streets, to the sound of bells ringing in the steeples. At road-crossings the procession stopped; after having been a sight, the members of it became in their turn sightseers. Wonders had been prepared to please them: here a forest with wild beasts and St. John the Baptist; elsewhere scenes from the Bible, or from knightly romances, the "pas de Saladin," for example, where the champion of England, Richard Cœur-de-Lion, fought the champion of Islam. At times it was a dumb-show, a sort of tableau vivant, at others actors moved but did not speak; at others again they did both, and complimented the king. A day came when the compliments were cut into dialogues; such practice was frequent in the fifteenth century, and it approached very near to the real drama.

In 1236, Henry III. of England having married Aliénor of Provence made his solemn entry into his capital. On this occasion were gathered together "so many nobles, so many ecclesiastics, such a concourse of people, such a quantity of histrions, that the town of London could scarcely hold them in her ample bosom—sinu suo capace.—All the town was adorned with silk banners, wreaths, hangings, candles and lamps, mechanisms and inventions of extraordinary kinds."

The same town, fond above all others of such exhibitions, and one of the last to preserve vestiges of them in her Lord Mayor's Show, outdid all that had been seen before when, on the 29th of August, 1393, Richard II. made his entry in state, after having consented to receive the citizens again into his favour. The streets were lined with cloth of gold and purple; "sweet smelling flowers" perfumed the air; tapestries with figures hung from the windows; the king was coming forth, splendid to look at, very proud of his good looks, "much like Troilus;" queen Anne took part also in the procession. A variety of scenes stop the progress and delight the onlookers; one had an unforeseen character. The queen was nearing the gate of the bridge, the old bridge with defensive towers and gates, and two cars full of ladies were following her, when one of the cars, "of Phaetonic make" says the classical-minded narrator, suddenly broke. Grave as saints, beautiful as angels, the ladies, losing their balance, fell head downwards; and the crowd, while full of admiration for what they saw, "could not suppress their laughter." The author of the description calls it, as Fragonard would have done, "a lucky chance," sors bona; but there was nothing of Fragonard in him except this word: he was a Carmelite and Doctor of Divinity.

Things having been set right again, the procession entered Cheapside, and there was seen an "admirable tower"; a young man and a young maiden came out of it, addressed Richard and Anne, and offered them crowns; at the Gate of St. Paul's a concert of music was heard; at Temple Bar, "barram Templi," a forest had been arranged on the gate, with animals of all sorts, serpents, lions, a bear, a unicorn, an elephant, a beaver, a monkey, a tiger, a bear, "all of which were there, running about, biting each other, fighting, jumping." Forests and beasts were supposed to represent the desert where St. John the Baptist had lived. An angel was let down from the roof, and offered the king and queen a little diptych in gold, with stones and enamel representing the Crucifixion; he made also a speech. At length the queen, who had an active part to play in this opera, came forward, and, owing to her intercession, the king, with due ceremony, consented to bestow his pardon on the citizens.

Many other examples might be adduced; feasts were numerous, and for a time caused pains to be forgotten: "oubliance était au voir," as Froissart says so well on an occasion of this sort. There were also for the people the May celebrations with their dances and songs, the impersonation of Robin Hood, later the performance of short plays of which he was the hero; and again those chimes, falling from the steeples, filling the air with their joyous peals. At Court there were the "masks" or "ballets" in which the great took part, wrapped in starry draperies, disguised with gold beards, dressed in skins or feathers, as were at Paris King Charles VI. and his friends on the 29th of January, 1392, in the famous Ballet of Wild Men, since called, from the catastrophe which happened, "Ballet des Ardents" (of men in fire). The taste for ballets and Masks was one of long duration; the Tudors and Stuarts were as fond of them as the Plantagenets, so much so that a branch apart in dramatic literature was created on this account, and it includes in England such graceful and touching masterpieces as the "Sad Shepherd" of Ben Jonson and the "Comus" of Milton.

II.

While histrions and amusers give a foretaste of farce and comedy in castle halls, while romantic drama is foreshadowed in the "pas de Saladin" and the "Taking of Troy," and the pastoral drama begins with May games, other sources of the modern dramatic art were springing up in the shadow of the cloister and under the naves of churches.

The imitation of any action is a step towards drama. Conventional, liturgical, ritualistic as the imitation was, still there was an imitation in the ceremony of mass; and mass led to the religious drama, which was therefore, at starting, as conventional, liturgical, and ritualistic as could be. Its early beginning is to be sought for in the antiphoned parts of the service, and then it makes one with the service itself. In a similar manner, outside the Church lay drama had begun with the alternate chansons, debates, poetical altercations of the singers of facetious or love-songs. A great step was made when, at the principal feasts of the year, Easter and Christmas, the chanters, instead of giving their responses from their stalls, moved in the Church to recall the action commemorated on that day; additions were introduced into the received text of the service; religious drama begins then to have an existence of its own.

"'Tell us, shepherds, whom do you seek in this stable?—They will answer: 'Christ the Saviour, our Lord.'"

Such is the starting-point; it dates from the tenth century; from this is derived the play of Shepherds, of which many versions have come down to us. One of them, followed in the cathedral of Rouen, gives a minute account of the performance as it was then acted in the midst of the religious service: "Be the crib established behind the altar, and be the image of the Blessed Mary placed there. First a child, from before the choir and on a raised platform, representing an angel, will announce the birth of the Saviour to five canons or their vicars of the second rank; the shepherds must come in by the great gate of the choir.... As they near the crib they sing the prose Pax in terris. Two priests of the first rank, wearing a dalmatic, will represent the midwives and stand by the crib."

These adventitious ornaments were greatly appreciated, and from year to year they were increased and perfected. Verse replaced prose; the vulgar idiom replaced Latin; open air and the public square replaced the church nave and its subdued light. It was no longer necessary to have recourse to priests wearing a dalmatic in order to represent midwives; the feminine parts were performed by young boys dressed as women: this was coming much nearer nature, as near in fact as Shakespeare did, for he never saw any but boys play the part of his Juliet. There were even cases in which actual women were seen on the mediæval stage. Those ameliorations, so simple and obvious, summed up in a phrase, were the work of centuries, but the tide when once on the flow was the stronger for waiting. The drama left the church, because its increased importance had made it cumbersome there, because it was badly seen, and because having power it wanted freedom.

Easter was the occasion for ornaments and additions similar to those introduced into the Christmas service. The ceremonies of Holy Week, which reproduced each incident in the drama of the Passion, lent themselves admirably to it. Additions following additions, the whole of the Old Testament ended by being grouped round and tied to the Christmas feast, and the whole of the New Testament round Easter. Both were closely connected, the scenes in the one being interpreted as symbols of the scenes in the other; complete cycles were thus formed, representing in two divisions the religious history of mankind from the Creation to Doomsday. Once severed from the church, these groups of plays often got also separated from the feast to which they owed their birth, and were represented at Whitsuntide, on Corpus Christi day, or on the occasion of some solemnity or other.

As the taste for such dramas was spreading, a variety of tragical subjects, not from the Bible, were turned into dialogues: first lives of saints, later, in France, some few subjects borrowed from history or romance: the story of Griselda, the raising of the siege at Orléans by Joan of Arc, &c. The English adhered more exclusively to the Bible. Dramas drawn from the lives of saints were usually called Miracles; those derived from the Bible, Mysteries; but these appellations had nothing very definite about them, and were often used one for the other.

The religious drama was on the way to lose its purely liturgical character when the conquest of England had taken place. Under the reign of the Norman and Angevin kings, the taste for dramatic performances increased considerably; within the first century after Hastings we find them numerous and largely attended.

The oldest representation the memory of which has come down to us took place at the beginning of the twelfth century, and had for its subject the story of that St. Catherine of Alexandria whom the Emperor Maximinus caused to be beheaded after she had converted the fifty orators entrusted with the care of bringing her back to paganism by dint of their eloquence. The fifty orators received baptism, and were burnt alive. The representation was managed by a Mancel of good family called Geoffrey, whom Richard, abbot of St. Albans, had asked to come from France to be the master of the Abbey school. But as he was late in starting, he found on his coming that the school had been given to another; in his leisure he caused to be represented at Dunstable a play, or miracle, of St. Catherine, "quendam ludum de Sancta Katerina quem miracula vulgariter appellamus." He borrowed from the sacristan at St. Albans the Abbey copes to dress his actors in; but the night following upon the performance, the fire consumed his house; all his books were burnt, and the copes too: "Wherefore, not knowing how to indemnify God and St. Albans, he offered his own person as a holocaust and took the habit in the monastery. This explains the zeal with which, having become abbot, he strove to enrich the convent with precious copes." For he became abbot, and died in 1146, after a reign of twenty-six years, and Matthew Paris, to whom we owe those details, and whose taste for works of art is well known, gives a full enumeration of the splendid purple and gold vestments, adorned with precious stones, with which the Mancel Geoffrey enriched the treasury of the Abbey.

A little later in the same century, Fitzstephen, who wrote under Henry II., mentions as a common occurrence the "representations of miracles" held in London. In the following century, under Henry III., some were written in the English language. During the fourteenth century, in the time of Chaucer, mysteries were at the height of their popularity; their heroes were familiar to all, and the sayings of the same became proverbs. Kings themselves journeyed in order to be present at the representations; Chaucer had seen them often, and the characters in his tales make frequent allusions to them; his drunken miller cries "in Pilates vois"; "Jolif Absolon" played the part of "king Herodes," and is it to be expected that an Alisoun could resist king Herodes? The Wife of Bath, dressed in her best garments, goes "to pleyes of miracles," and there tries to make acquaintances that may be turned into husbands when she wants them. "Hendy Nicholas" quotes to the credulous carpenter the example of Noah, whose wife would not go on board, and who regretted that he had not built a separate ship for "hir-self allone."

A treatise, written in English at this period, against such representations, shows the extreme favour in which they stood with all classes of society. The enthusiasm was so general and boundless that it seems to the author indispensable to take the field and retort (for the question was keenly disputed) the arguments put forward to justify the performance of mysteries. The works and miracles of Christ, he observes, were not done for play; He did them "ernystfully," and we use them "in bourde and pleye!" It is treating with great familiarity the Almighty, who may well say: "Pley not with me, but pley with thi pere." Let us beware of His revenge; it well may happen that "God takith more venjaunce on us than a lord that sodaynly sleeth his servaunt for he pleyide to homely with hym;" and yet the lord's vengeance cannot be considered a trifling one.

What do the abettors of mysteries answer to this? They answer that "thei pleyen these myraclis in the worschip of God"; they lead men to think and meditate; devils are seen there carrying the wicked away to hell; the sufferings of Christ are represented, and the hardest are touched, they are seen weeping for pity; for people wept and laughed at the representations, openly and noisily, "wepynge bitere teris." Besides, there are men of different sorts, and some are so made that they cannot be converted but by mirthful means, "by gamen and pley"; and such performances do them much good. Must not, on the other hand, all men have "summe recreatioun"? Better it is, "or lesse yvele, that thei han thyre recreacoun by pleyinge of myraclis than bi pleyinge of other japis." And one more very sensible reason is given: "Sithen it is leveful to han the myraclis of God peyntid, why is not as wel leveful to han the myraclis of God pleyed ... and betere thei ben holden in mennus mynde and oftere rehersid by the pleyinge of hem than by the peyntynge, for this is a deed bok, the tother a quick."

To those reasons, which he does not try to conceal, but on the contrary presents very forcibly, the fair-minded author answers his best. These representations are too amusing; after such enjoyments, everyday life seems plain and dull; women of "yvil continaunse," Wives of Bath maybe, or worse, flock there and do not remain idle. The fact that they come does not prevent the priests from going too; yet it is "uttirly" forbidden them "not onely to been myracle pleyere but also to heren or to seen myraclis pleyinge." But they set the decree at nought and "pleyn in entirlodies," and go and see them: "The prestis that seyn hemsilf holy, and besien hem aboute siche pleyis, ben verry ypocritis and lyeris." All bounds have been overstepped; it is no longer a taste, but a passion; men are carried away by it; citizens become avaricious and grasping to get money in view of the representations and the amusements which follow: "To peyen ther rente and ther dette thei wolen grucche, and to spende two so myche upon ther pley thei wolen nothinge grucche." Merchants and tradesmen "bygilen ther neghbors, in byinge and sellyng," that is "hideous coveytise," that is "maumetrie"; and they do it "to han to spenden on these miraclis."

Many documents corroborate these statements and show the accuracy of the description. The fondness of priests for plays and similar pastimes is descanted upon by the Council of London in 1391. A hundred years earlier an Englishman, in a poem which he wrote in French, had pointed out exactly the same abuses: from which can be perceived how deeply rooted they were. Another folly, William de Wadington had said, has been invented by mad clerks; it consists in what is called Miracles; in spite of decrees they disguise themselves with masks, "li forsené!" Purely liturgical drama, of course, is permissible (an additional proof of its existence in England); certain representations can be held, "provided they be chastely set up and included in the Church service," as is done when the burial of Christ or the Resurrection is represented "to increase devotion." But to have "those mad gatherings in the streets of towns, or in the cemeteries, after dinner," to prepare for the idle such meeting-places, is a quite different thing; if they tell you that they do it with good intent and to the honour of God, do not believe them; it is all "for the devil." If players ask you to lend them horses, equipments, dresses, and ornaments of all sorts, don't fail to refuse. For the stage continued to live upon loans, and the example of the copes of St. Albans destroyed by fire had not deterred convents from continuing to lend sacred vestments to actors. In the case of sacred vestments, says William, "the sin is much greater." In all this, as well as in all sorts of dances and frolics, a heavy responsibility rests with the minstrels; they ply a dangerous trade, a "trop perilus mester"; they cause God to be forgotten, and the vanity of the world to be cherished.

Not a few among these English dramas, so popular in former days, have come down to us. Besides separate pieces, histories of saints (very scarce in England), or fragments of old series, several collections have survived, the property whilom of gilds or municipalities. A number of towns kept up those shows, which attracted visitors, and were at the same time edifying, profitable, and amusing. From the fourteenth century the performances were in most cases intrusted to the gilds, each craft having as much as possible to represent a play in accordance with its particular trade. Shipwrights represented the building of the ark; fishermen, the Flood; goldsmiths, the coming of the three kings with their golden crowns; wine merchants, the marriage at Cana, where a miracle took place very much in their line. In other cases the plays were performed by gilds founded especially for that purpose: gild of Corpus Christi, of the Pater Noster, &c. This last had been created because "once on a time, a play setting forth the goodness of the Lord's Prayer was played in the city of York, in which play all manner of vices and sins were held up to scorn and the virtues were held up to praise. This play met with such favour that many said: 'Would that this play could be kept in this city, for the health of souls and for the comfort of citizens and neighbours!' Hence the keeping up of that play in times to come" (year 1389).

In a more or less complete state, the collections of the Mysteries performed at Chester, Coventry, Woodkirk, and York have been preserved, without speaking of fragments of other series. Most of those texts belong to the fourteenth century, but have been retouched at a later date. Old Mysteries did not escape the hand of the improvers, any more than old churches, where any one who pleased added paintings, porches, and tracery, according to the fashion of the day.

These dramatic entertainments, which thrilled a whole town, to which flocked, with equal zeal, peasants and craftsmen, citizens, noblemen, kings and queens, which the Reformation succeeded in killing only after half a century's fight, enlivened with incomparable glow the monotonous course of days and weeks. The occasion was a solemn one; preparation was begun long beforehand; it was an important affair, an affair of State. Gilds taxed their members to secure a fair representation of the play assigned to them; they were fined by the municipal authority in case they proved careless and inefficient, or were behind their time to begin.

Read as they are, without going back in our minds to times past and taking into account the circumstances of their composition, Mysteries may well be judged a gross, childish, and barbarous production. Still, they are worthy of great attention, as showing a side of the soul of our ancestors, who in all this did their very best: for those performances were not got up anyhow: they were the result of prolonged care and attention. Not any man who wished was accepted as an actor; some experience of the art was expected; and in some towns even examinations took place. At York a decree of the Town Council ordains that long before the appointed day, "in the tyme of lentyn" (while the performance itself took place in summer, at the Corpus Christi celebration) "there shall be called afore the maire for the tyme beyng four of the moste connyng discrete and able players within this Citie, to serche, here and examen all the plaiers and plaies and pagentes thrughoute all the artificers belonging to Corpus Christi plaie. And all suche as thay shall fynde sufficiant in personne and connyng, to the honour of the Citie and worship of the saide craftes, for to admitte and able; and all other insufficiant personnes, either in connyng, voice, or personne to discharge, ammove and avoide." All crafts were bound to bring "furthe ther pageantez in order and course by good players, well arayed and openly spekyng, upon payn of lesying 100 s. to be paide to the chambre without any pardon." These texts belong to the fifteenth century, but there are older ones; and they show that from the beginning the difference between good and bad actors was appreciated and great importance was attached to the gestures and delivery. The Mystery of "Adam" (in French, the work, it seems, of a Norman), which belongs to the twelfth century, commences with recommendations to players: "Be Adam well trained so as to answer at the appropriate time without any slackness or haste. The same with the other actors; let them speak in sedate fashion, with gestures fitting the words; be they mindful not to add or suppress a syllable in the verses; and be their pronunciation constantly clear." The amusement afforded by such exhibitions, the personal fame acquired by good actors, suddenly drawn from the shadow in which their working lives had been spent till then, acted so powerfully on craftsmen that some would not go back to the shop, and, leaving their tools behind them, became professional actors; thus showing that there was some wisdom in the reproof set forth in the "Tretise of Miraclis pleyinge."

Once emerged from the Church, the drama had the whole town in which to display itself; and it filled the whole town. On these days the city belonged to dramatic art; each company had its cars or scaffolds, pageants (placed on wheels in some towns), each car being meant to represent one of the places where the events in the play happened. The complete series of scenes was exhibited at the main crossings, or on the principal squares or open spaces in the town. The inhabitants of neighbouring houses sat thus as in a front row, and enjoyed a most enviable privilege, so enviable that it was indeed envied, and at York, for example, they had to pay for it. After 1417 the choosing of the places for the representations was regulated by auction, and the plays were performed under the windows of the highest bidders. In other cases the scaffolds were fixed; so that the representation was performed only at one place.

The form of the scaffolds varied from town to town. At Chester "these pagiantes or cariage was a highe place made like a house with two rowmes beinge open on y^e tope: the lower rowme they apparrelled and dressed them selves; and in the higher rowme they played: and they stoode upon six wheeles. And when they had done with one cariage in one place, they wheeled the same from one streete to an other." In some cases the scaffolds were not so high, and boards made a communication between the raised platform and the ground; a horseman could thus ride up the scaffold: "Here Erode ragis in the pagond and in the strete also."

Sometimes the upper room did not remain open, but a curtain was drawn, according to the necessity of the action. The heroes of the play moved about the place, and went from one scaffold to another; dialogue then took place between players on the ground and players on the boards: "Here thei take Jhesu and lede hym in gret hast to Herowde; and the Herowdys scaffald xal unclose, shewyng Herowdes in astat, alle the Jewys knelyng except Annas and Cayaphas." Chaucer speaks of the "scaffold hye" on which jolif Absolon played Herod; king Herod in fact was always enthroned high above the common rabble.

The arrangements adopted in England differed little, as we see, from the French ones; and it could scarcely be otherwise, as the taste for these dramas had been imported by the Normans and Angevins. Neither in England nor in France were there ever any of those six-storied theatres described by the brothers Parfait, each story being supposed to represent a different place or country. To keep to truth, we should, on the contrary, picture to ourselves those famous buildings stretched all along on the ground, with their different compartments scattered round the public square.

But we have better than words and descriptions to give us an idea of the sight; we have actual pictures, offering to view all the details of the performances. An exquisite miniature of Jean Fouquet, preserved at Chantilly, which has never been studied as it ought to be with reference to this question, has for its subject the life of St. Apollinia. Instead of painting a fancy picture, Fouquet has chosen to represent the martyrdom of the saint as it was acted in a miracle play. The main action takes place on the ground; Apollinia is there, in the middle of the executioners. Round the place are scaffolds with a lower room and an upper room, as at Chester, and there are curtains to close them. One of those boxes represents Paradise; angels with folded arms, quietly seated on the wooden steps of their stairs, await the moment when they must speak; another is filled with musicians playing the organ and other instruments; a third contains the throne of the king. The throne is empty; for the king, Julian the apostate, his sceptre, adorned with fleurs-de-lys, in his hand, has come down his ladder to take part in the main action. Hell has its usual shape of a monstrous head, with opening and closing jaws; it stands on the ground, for the better accommodation of devils, who had constantly to interfere in the drama, and to keep the interest of the crowd alive, by running suddenly through it, with their feathers and animals' skins, howling and grinning; "to the great terror of little children," says Rabelais, who, like Chaucer, had often been present at such dramas. Several devils are to be seen in the miniature; they have cloven feet, and stand outside the hell-mouth; a buffoon also is to be seen, who raises a laugh among the audience and shows his scorn for the martyr by the means described three centuries earlier in John of Salisbury's book, exhibiting his person in a way "quam erubescat videre vel cynicus."

Besides the scaffolds, boxes or "estableis" meant for actors, others are reserved for spectators of importance, or those who paid best. This commingling of actors and spectators would seem to us somewhat confusing; but people were not then very exacting; with them illusion was easily caused, and never broken. This magnificent part of the audience, besides, with its rich garments, was itself a sight; and so little objection was made to the presence of beholders of that sort that we shall find them seated on the Shakesperean stage as well as on the stage of Corneille and of Molière. "I was on the stage, meaning to listen to the play ..." says the Éraste of "Les Facheux." In the time of Shakespeare the custom followed was even more against theatrical illusion, as there were gentlemen not only on the sides of the scene, but also behind the actors; they filled a vast box fronting the pit.

The dresses were rich: this is the best that can be said of them. Saints enwreathed their chins with curling beards of gold; God the Father was dressed as a pope or a bishop. For good reasons the audience did not ask much in the way of historical accuracy; all it wanted was signs. Copes and tiaras were in its eyes religious signs by excellence, and in the wearer of such they recognised God without hesitation. The turban of the Saracens, Mahomet the prophet of the infidels, were known to the mob, which saw in them the signs and symbols of irreligiousness and impiety. Herod, for this cause, wore a turban, and swore premature oaths by "Mahound." People were familiar with symbols, and the use of them was continued; the painters at the Renaissance represented St. Stephen with a stone in his hand and St. Paul with a sword, which stone and sword stood for symbols, and the sight of them evoked all the doleful tale of their sufferings and death.

The authors of Mysteries did not pay, as we may well believe, great attention to the rule of the three Unities. The events included in the French Mystery of the "Vieil Testament" did not take place in one day, but in four thousand years. The most distant localities were represented next to each other: Rome, Jerusalem, Marseilles. The scaffolds huddled close together scarcely gave an idea of geographical realities; the imagination of the beholders was expected to supply what was wanting: and so it did. A few square yards of ground (sometimes, it must be acknowledged, of water) were supposed to be the Mediterranean; Marseilles was at one end, and Jaffa at the other. A few minutes did duty for months, years, or centuries. Herod sends a messenger to Tiberius; the tetrarch has scarcely finished his speech when his man is already at Rome, and delivers his message to the emperor. Noah gets into his ark and shuts his window; here a silence lasting a minute or so; the window opens, and Noah declares that the forty days are past ("Chester Plays").

To render, however, his task easier to the public, some precautions were taken to let them perceive where they were. Sometimes the name of the place was written on a piece of wood or canvas, a clear and honest means. It worked so successfully that it was still resorted to in Elizabethan times; we see "Thebes written in great letters upon an olde doore," says Sir Philip Sidney, and without asking for more we are bound "to beleeve that it is Thebes." In other cases the actor followed the sneering advice Boileau was to express later, and in very simple fashion declared who he was: I am Herod! I am Tiberius! Or again, when they moved from one place to another, they named both: now we are arrived, I recognise Marseilles; "her is the lond of Mercylle." Most of those inventions were long found to answer, and very often Shakespeare had no better ones to use. The same necessities caused him to make up for the deficiency of the scenery by his wonderful descriptions of landscapes, castles, and wild moors. All that poetry would have been lost had he had painted scenery at his disposal.

Some attempts at painted scenery were made, it is true, but so plain and primitive that the thing again acted as a symbol rather than as the representation of a place. A throne meant the palace of the king. God divides light from darkness: "Now must be exhibited a sheet painted, know you, one half all white and the other half all black." The creation of animals comes nearer the real truth: "Now must be let loose little birds that will fly in the air, and must be placed on the ground, ducks, swans, geese ... with as many strange beasts as it will have been possible to secure." But truth absolute was observed when the state of innocence had to be represented: "Now must Adam rise all naked and look round with an air of admiration and wonder." Beholders doubtless returned his wonder and admiration. In the Chester Mysteries a practical recommendation is made to the actors who personate the first couple: "Adam and Eve shall stande nakede, and shall not be ashamed." The proper time to be ashamed will come a little later. The serpent steals "out of a hole"; man falls: "Now must Adam cover himself and feign to be ashamed. The woman must also be seized with shame, and cover herself with her hands."

If painted scenery was greatly neglected, machinery received more attention. That characteristic of modern times, yeast through which the old world has been transformed, the hankering after the unattainable, which caused so many great deeds, had also smaller results; it affected these humble details. Painted canvas was neglected, but people laboured at the inventing of machinery. While a sheet half white and half black was hung to represent light and chaos, in the drama of "Adam," so early as the twelfth century, a self-moving serpent, "serpens artificiose compositus," tempted the woman in Paradise. Wondering Eve offered but small resistance. Elsewhere an angel carried Enoch "by a subtile engine" into Paradise. In the Doomesday play of the Chester Mysteries, "Jesus was to come down as on a cloud, if that could be managed." But sometimes it could not; in Fouquet's miniature the angels have no other machinery but a ladder to allow them to descend from heaven to earth. In the "Mary Magdalene" of the Digby Mysteries a boat appeared with mast and sail, and carried to Palestine the King of Marseilles.

Hell was in all times most carefully arranged, and it had the best machinery. The mouth opened and closed, threw flames from its nostrils, and let loose upon the crowd devils armed with hooks and emitting awful yells. From the back of the mouth appalling noises were heard, being meant for the moans of the damned. These moans were produced by a simple process: pots and frying-pans were knocked against each other. In "Adam," the heroes of the play are taken to hell, there to await the coming of Christ; and the scene, according to the stage direction in the manuscript, was to be represented thus: "Then the Devil will come and three or four devils with him with chains in their hands and iron rings which they will put round the neck of Adam and Eve. Some push them and others draw them toward hell. Other devils awaiting them by the entrance jump and tumble as a sign of their joy for the event." After Adam has been received within the precincts of hell, "the devils will cause a great smoke to rise; they will emit merry vociferations, and knock together their pans and caldrons so as to be heard from the outside. After a while, some devils will come out and run about the place." Pans were of frequent use; Abel had one under his tunic, and Cain, knocking on it, drew forth lugubrious sounds, which went to the heart of the audience.

The machinery became more and more complicated toward the time of the Renaissance; but much money was needed, and for long the Court or the municipalities could alone use them. In England fixed or movable scenery reaches great perfection at Court: Inigo Jones shows a genius in arranging elegant decorations; some of his sketches have been preserved. But such splendid inventions were too costly to be transferred to the stages for which Shakespeare wrote; and he never used any other magic but that of his poetry. Inigo Jones had fine scene-shiftings with the help of his machinists, and Shakespeare with the help of his verses; these last have this advantage, that they have not faded, and can still be seen.

III.

Whatever may be thought of so much simplicity, childishness, or barbarity of those ivy-clad ruins, the forms of which can scarcely be discerned, they must be subjected to a closer inspection; and if there were no other, this one consideration would be enough to incline us to it: while in the theatre of Bacchus the tragedies of Sophocles were played once and no more, the Christian drama, remodelled from century to century, was represented for four hundred years before immense multitudes; and this is a unique phenomenon in the history of literature.

The fact may be ascribed to several causes, some of which have already been pointed out. The desire to see was extremely keen, and there was seen all that could be wished: the unattainable, the unperceivable, miracles, the king's Court, earthly paradise, all that had been heard of or dreamt about. Means of realisation were rude, but the public held them satisfactory.

What feasts were in the year, sacraments were in the existence of men; they marked the great memorable stages of life. A complete net of observances and religious obligations surrounded the months and seasons; bells never remained long silent; they rang less discreetly than now, and were not afraid to disturb conversations by their noise. At each period of the day they recalled that there were prayers to say, and to those even who did not pray they recalled the importance of religion. Existences were thus impregnated with religion; and religion was in its entirety explained, made accessible and visible, in the Mysteries.

The verses spoken by the actors did not much resemble those in Shakespeare; they were, in most cases, mere tattle, scarcely verses; rhyme and alliteration were sometimes used both together, and both anyhow. And yet the emotion was deep; in the state of mind with which the spectators came, nothing would have prevented their being touched by the affecting scenes, neither the lame verse nor the clumsy machinery; the cause of the emotion was the subject, and not the manner in which the subject was represented. All the past of humanity and its eternal future were at stake; players, therefore, were sometimes interrupted by the passionate exclamations of the crowd. At a drama lately represented on the stage of the Comédie Française, one of the audience astonished his neighbours by crying: "Mais signe donc! Est-elle bête!..." In the open air of the public place, at a time when manners were less polished, many such interjections interrupted the performance; many insulting apostrophes were addressed to Eve when she listened to the serpent; and the serpent spoke (in the Norman drama of "Adam") a language easy to understand, the language of everyday life:

"Diabolus.—I saw Adam; he is an ass."

"Eva.—He is a little hard."

"Diabolus.—We shall melt him; but at present he is harder than iron."

But thou, Eve, thou art a superior being, a delicate one, a delight for the eyes. "Thou art a little tender thing, fresher than the rose, whiter than crystal, or snow falling on the ice in a dale. The Creator has badly matched the couple; thou art too sweet; man is too hard.... For which it is very pleasant to draw close to thee. Let me have a talk with thee."

And for such cajolery, for such folly, thought the crowd, for this sin of our common mother, we sweat and we suffer, we observe Lent, we experience temptations, and under our feet this awful hell-mouth opens, in which, maybe, we shall some day fall. Eve, turn away from the serpent!

Greater even was the emotion caused by the drama of the Passion, the sufferings of the Redeemer, all the details of which were familiar to everybody. The indignation was so keen that the executioners had difficulty sometimes in escaping the fury of the multitude.

The Middle Ages were the age of contrasts; what measure meant was then unknown. This has already been noticed à propos of Chaucer; the cleverest compensated, as Chaucer did, their Miller's tales with stories of Griselda. When they intend to be tender the authors of Mysteries fall in most cases into that mawkish sentimentality by which the man of the people or the barbarian is often detected. A feeling for measure is a produce of civilisation, and men of the people ignore it. Those street daubers who draw on the flags of the London foot-paths always represent heartrending scenes, or scenes of a sweetness unspeakable: here are fires, storms, and disasters; now a soldier, in the middle of a battle, forgets his own danger, and washes the wound of his horse; then cascades under an azure sky, amidst a spring landscape, with a blue bird flying about. Many such drawings might be detected in Dickens, many also in the Mysteries. After a truly touching scene between Abraham and his son, the pretty things Isaac does and says, his prayer not to see the sword so keen, cease to touch, and come very near making us laugh. The contrast between the fury of Herod and the sweetness of Joseph and Mary is similarly carried to an extreme. This same Joseph who a minute ago insulted his wife in words impossible to quote, has now become such a sweet and gentle saint that one can scarcely believe the same man addresses us. He is packing before his journey to Egypt; he will take his tools with him, his "smale instrumentes." Is there anything more touching? Nothing, except perhaps the appeal of the street painter, calling our attention to the fact that he draws "on the rude stone." How could the passer-by not be touched by the idea that the stone is so hard? In the Middle Ages people melted at this, they were moved, they wept; and all at once they were in a mood to enjoy the most enormous buffooneries. These fill a large place in the Mysteries, and beside them shine scenes of real comedy, evincing great accuracy of observation.

The personages worst treated in Mysteries are always kings; they are mostly represented as being grotesque and mischievous. The playwrights might have given as their excuse that their kings are miscreants, and that black is not dark enough to paint such faces. But to this commendable motive was added a sly pleasure felt in caricaturing those great men, not only because they were heathens, but also because they were kings; for when Christian princes and lords appear on the stage, the satire is often continued. Thus Lancelot of the Lake appears unexpectedly at the Court of king Herod, and after much rant the lover of queen Guinevere draws his invincible sword and massacres the Innocents ("Chester Plays").

Herod, Augustus, Tiberius, Pilate, Pharaoh, the King of Marseilles, always open the scenes where they figure with a speech, in which they sound their own praise. It was an established tradition; in the same way as God the Father delivered a sermon, these personages made what the manuscripts technically call "their boast." They are the masters of the universe; they wield the thunder; everybody obeys them; they swear and curse unblushingly (by Mahomet); they are very noisy. They strut about, proud of their fine dresses and fine phrases, and of their French, French being there again a token of power and authority. The English Herod could not claim kinship with the Norman Dukes, but the subjects of Angevin monarchs would have shrugged their shoulders at the representation of a prince who did not speak French. It was for them the sign of princeship, as a tiara was the sign of godhead. Herod therefore spoke French, a very mean sort of French, it is true, and the Parliament of Paris which was to express later its indignation at the faulty grammar of the "Confrères de la Passion" would have suffered much if it had seen what became of the noble language of France on the scaffolds at Chester. But it did not matter; any words were enough, in the same way as any sword would do as an emblem for St. Paul.

One of the duties of these strutting heroes was to maintain silence. It seemed as if they had a privilege for noise making, and they repressed encroachments; their task was not an easy one. Be still, "beshers," cries Augustus; "beshers" means "beaux sires" in the kingly French of the Mysteries:

Be stylle, beshers, I commawnd you,
That no man speke a word here now
Bot I my self alon.
And if ye do, I make a vow,
Thys brand abowte youre nekys shalle bow,
For-thy by stylle as ston.

Silence! cries Tiberius. Silence! cries Herod:

Styr not bot ye have lefe,
For if ye do I clefe
You smalle as flesh to pott.

Tiberius knows Latin, and does not conceal it from the audience:

Stynt, I say, gyf men place, quia sum dominus dominorum,
He that agans me says rapietur lux oculorum.

And each of them hereupon moves about his scaffold, and gives the best idea he can of the magnitude of his power:

Above all kynges under the cloudys crystall,
Royally I reigne in welthe without woo ...
I am Kyng Herowdes.

Be it known, says another:

That of heven and hell chyff rewlar am I,
To wos magnyfycens non stondyt egall,
For I am soveren of al soverens.

Make room, says a third:

A-wantt, a-want the, on-worthy wrecchesse!
Why lowtt ye nat low to my lawdabyll presens?...
I am a sofereyn semely, that ye se butt seyld;
Non swyche onder sonne, the sothe for to say ...
I am kyng of Marcylle!

Such princes fear nothing, and are never abashed; they are on familiar terms with the audience, and interpellate the bystanders, which was a sure cause of merriment, but not of good order. Octavian, being well pleased with the services of one of his men, tells him:

Boye, their be ladyes many a one,
Amonge them all chouse thee one,
Take the faierest, or elles non,
And freely I geve her thee.

Every lord bows to my law, observes Tiberius:

Is it nat so? Sey yow all with on showte.

and a note in the manuscript has: "Here answerryt all the pepul at ons,'Ya, my lord, ya.'" All this was performed with appropriate gesture, that is, as wild as the words they went with, a tradition that long survived. Shakespeare complained, as we know, of the delivery of those actors who "out-heroded Herod."

The authors of English Mysteries had no great experience of Courts; they drew their caricatures somewhat haphazard. They were neither very learned nor very careful; anachronisms and mistakes swarm under their pen. While Herod sacrifices to Mahomet, Noah invokes the Blessed Virgin, and the Christmas shepherds swear by "the death of Christ," whose birth is announced to them at the end of the play.

The psychology of these dramas is not very deep, especially when the question is of personages of rank, and of feelings of a refined sort. The authors of Mysteries speak then at random and describe by hearsay; they have seen their models only from afar, and are not familiar with them. When they have to show how it is that young Mary Magdalen, as virtuous as she was beautiful, consents to sin for the first time, they do it in the plainest fashion. A "galaunt" meets her and tells her that he finds her very pretty, and loves her. "Why, sir," the young lady replies, "wene you that I were a kelle (prostitute)?" Not at all, says the other, but you are so pretty! Shall we not dance together? Shall we drink something?

Soppes in wyne, how love ye?

Mary does not resist those proofs of true love, and answers:

As ye dou, so doth me;
I am ryth glad that met be we;
My love in yow gynnyt to close.

Then, "derlyng dere," let us go, says the "galaunt."

Mary. Ewyn at your wyl, my dere derlyng!
Thow ye wyl go to the woldes eynd,
I wol never from yow wynd (turn).

Clarissa Harlowe will require more forms and more time; here twenty-five verses have been enough. A century and a half divides "Mary Magdalene" from the dramatised story of the "Weeping Bitch"; the interpretation of the movements of the feminine heart has not greatly improved, and we are very far as yet from Richardson and Shakespeare.

But truth was more closely observed when the authors spoke of what they knew by personal experience, and described men of the poorer sort with whom they were familiar. In this lies the main literary merit of the Mysteries; there may be found the earliest scenes of real comedy in the history of the English stage.

This comedy of course is very near farce: in everything people then went to extremes. Certain merry scenes were as famous as the rant of Herod, and they have for centuries amused the England of former days. The strife between husband and wife, Noah and his wife, Pilate and his wife, Joseph and Mary, this last a very shocking one, were among the most popular.

In all the collections of English Mysteries Noah's wife is an untamed shrew, who refuses to enter the ark. In the York collection, Noah being ordered by "Deus" to build his boat, wonders somewhat at first:

A! worthy lorde, wolde thou take heede,
I am full olde and oute of qwarte.

He sets to work, however; rain begins; the time for sailing has arrived: Noah calls his wife; she does not come. Get into the ark and "leve the harde lande?" This she will not do. She meant to go this very day to town, and she will:

Doo barnes, goo we and trusse to towne.

She does not fear the flood; Noah remarks that the rain has been terrific of late, and has lasted many days, and that her idea of going just then to town is not very wise. The lady is not a whit pacified; why have made a secret of all this to her? Why had he not consulted her? It turns out that her husband had been working at the ark for a hundred years, and she did not know of it! Life in a boat is not at all pleasant; anyhow she will want time to pack; also she must take her gossips with her, to have some one to talk to during the voyage. Noah, who in building his boat has given some proof of his patience, does not lose courage; he receives a box on the ear; he is content with saying:

I pray the, dame, be stille.

The wife at length gets in, and, as we may believe, stormy days in more senses than one are in store for the patriarch.

St. Joseph is a poor craftsman, described from nature, using the language of craftsmen, having their manners, their ignorances, their aspirations. Few works in the whole range of mediæval literature contain better descriptions of the workman of that time than the Mysteries in which St. Joseph figures; some of his speeches ought to have a place in the collections of Political Songs. The Emperor Augustus has availed himself of the occasion afforded by the census to establish a new tax: "A! lorde," says the poor Joseph,

what doth this man nowe heare!
Poore mens weale is ever in were (doubt),
I wotte by this bolsters beare
That tribute I muste paye;
And for greate age and no power
I wan no good this seven yeaire;
Nowe comes the kinges messingere,
To gette all that he maye.
With this axe that I beare,
This perscer and this nagere,
A hamer all in feare,
I have wonnen my meate.
Castill, tower ne manere
Had I never in my power;
But as a simple carpentere
With these what I mighte gette.
Yf I have store nowe anye thing,
That I must paye unto the kinge.

Only an ox is left him; he will go and sell it. It is easy to fancy that, in the century which saw the Statutes of Labourers and the rising of the peasants, such words found a ready echo in the audience.

As soon as men of the people appear on the scene, nearly always the dialogue becomes lively; real men and women stand and talk before us. Beside the workmen represented by St. Joseph, peasants appear, represented by the shepherds of Christmas night. They are true English shepherds; if they swear, somewhat before due time, by Christ, all surprise disappears when we hear them name the places where they live: Lancashire, the Clyde valley, Boughton near Chester, Norbury near Wakefield. Of all possible ales, Ely's is the one they prefer. They talk together of the weather, the time of the day, the mean salaries they get, the stray sheep they have been seeking; they eat their meals under the hedge, sing merry songs, exchange a few blows, in fact behave as true shepherds of real life. Quite at the end only, when the "Gloria" is heard, they will assume the sober attitude befitting Christmas Day.

In the Mysteries performed at Woodkirk, the visit to the new-born Child was preceded by a comedy worthy to be compared with the famous farce of "Pathelin," and which has nothing to do with Christmas. It is night; the shepherds talk; the time for sleeping comes. One among them, Mak, has a bad repute, and is suspected of being a thief; they ask him to sleep in the midst of the others: "Com heder, betwene shalle thou lyg downe." But Mak rises during the night without being observed. How hard they sleep! he says, and he carries away a "fatt shepe," and takes it to his wife.

Wife. It were a fowlle blotte to be hanged for the case.

Mak. I have skapyd, Gelott, oft as hard as glase.

Wife. Bot so long goys the pott to the water, men says,
At last
Comys it home broken.

I remember it well, says Mak, but it is not a time for proverbs and talk; let us do for the best. The shepherds know Mak too well not to come straight to his house; and so they do. Moans are heard; the cause being, they learn, that Mak's wife has just given birth to a child. As the shepherds walk in, Mak meets them with a cheerful countenance, and welcomes them heartily:

Bot ar ye in this towne to-day?
Now how fare ye?
Ye have ryn in the myre, and ar weytt yit;
I shalle make you a fyre, if ye wille syt.

His offers are coldly received, and the visitors explain what has happened.

Nowe if you have suspowse, to Gille or to me,
Com and rype oure howse!

The woman moans more pitifully than ever:

Wife. Outt, thefys, fro my barne! negh hym not thore.

Mak. Wyst ye how she had farne, youre hartys wold be sore.
Ye do wrang, I you warne, that thus commys before
To a woman that has farne, bot I say no more.

Wife. A my medylle!
I pray God so mylde,
If ever I you begyld,
That I ete this chylde
That lyges in this credylle.

The shepherds, deafened by the noise, look none the less about the house, but find nothing. Their host is not yet, however, at the end of his trouble.

Tertius Pastor. Mak, with youre lefe, let me gyf youre barne
Bot six pence.

Mak. Nay, do way, he slepys.

Pastor. Me thynk he pepys.

Mak. When he wakyns he wepys;
I pray you go hence.

Pastor. Gyf me lefe hym to kys, and lyft up the clowth.
What the deville is this? he has a long snowte!

And the fraud is discovered; it was the sheep. From oaths they were coming to blows, when on a sudden, amid the stars, angels are seen, and their song is heard in the night: Glory to God, peace to earth! the world is rejuvenated.... Anger disappears, hatreds are effaced, and the rough shepherds of England take, with penitent heart, the road to Bethlehem.

IV.

The fourteenth century saw the religious drama at its height in England; the fifteenth saw its decay; the sixteenth its death. The form under which it was best liked was the form of Mysteries, based upon the Bible. The dramatising of the lives of saints and miracles of the Virgin was much less popular in England than in France. In the latter country enormous collections of such plays have been preserved; in the other the examples of this kind are very few; the Bible was the main source from which the English dramatists drew their inspiration. As we have seen, however, they did not forbear from adding scenes and characters with nothing evangelical in them; these scenes contributed, with the interludes and the facetious dialogues of the jongleurs, to the formation of comedy. Little by little, comedy took shape, and it will be found existing as a separate branch of dramatic art at the time of the Renaissance.

In the same period another sort of drama was to flourish, the origin of which was as old as the fourteenth century, namely, Moralities. These plays consisted in pious treatises and ethical books turned into dramas, as Mysteries offered a dramatisation of Scriptures. Psychology was there carried to the extreme, a peculiar sort of psychology, elementary and excessive at the same time, and very different from the delicate art in favour to-day. Individuals disappeared; they were replaced by abstractions, and these abstractions represented only a single quality or defect. Sins and virtues fought together and tried to draw mankind to them, which stood doubtful, as Hercules "at the starting point of a double road;" in this way, again, was manifested the fondness felt in the Middle Ages for allegories and symbols. The "Roman de la Rose" in France, "Piers Plowman" in England, the immense popularity in all Europe of the Consolation of Boethius, had already been manifestations of those same tendencies. In these works, already, dialogue was abundant, in the "Roman de la Rose" especially, where an immense space is occupied by conversations between the Lover and Fals-Semblant. The names of the speakers are inscribed in the margin, as if it were a real play. When he admitted into his collection of tales the dialogued story of Melibeus and Prudence, Chaucer came very near to Moralities, for the work he produced was neither a treatise nor a tale, nor a drama, but had something of the three; a few changes would have been enough to make of it a Morality, which might have been called the Debate of Wisdom and Mankind.

Abstractions had been allowed a place in the Mysteries so far back as the fourteenth century; death figures in the Woodkirk collection; in "Mary Magdalene" (fifteenth century) many abstract personages are mixed with the others: the Seven Deadly Sins, Mundus, the King of the Flesh, Sensuality, &c.; the same thing happens in the so-called Coventry collection.

This sort of drama, for us unendurable, gradually separated from Mysteries; it reached its greatest development under the early Tudors. The authors of Moralities strove to write plays not merely amusing, as farces, then also in great favour, but plays with a useful and practical aim. By means of now unreadable dramas, virtues, religion, morals, sciences were taught: the Catholic faith was derided by Protestants, and the Reformation by Catholics. The discovery, then quite new, of America was discoursed about, and great regret was expressed at its being not due to an Englishman:

O what a thynge had be than,
If they that be Englyshemen
Myght have ben furst of all
That there shuld have take possessyon!

Death, as might be expected, is placed upon the stage with a particular zeal and care, and meditations are dedicated to the dark future of man, and to the gnawing worm of the charnel house.

Fearing the audience might go to sleep, or perhaps go away, the science and the austere philosophy taught in these plays were enlivened by tavern scenes, and by the gambols of a clown, fool, or buffoon, called Vice, armed, as Harlequin, with a wooden dagger. And often, such is human frailty, the beholders went, remembering nothing but the mad pranks of Vice. It was in their eyes the most important character in the play, and the part was accordingly entrusted to the best actor. Shakespeare had seen Vice still alive, and he commemorated his deeds in a song:

I am gone, sir,
And anon, sir,
I'll be with you again,
In a trice,
Like to the old Vice,
Your need to sustain,
Who, with dagger of lath,
In his rage and his wrath,
Cries, ah ha! to the devil.

This character also found place on the French stage, where it was called the "Badin." Rabelais had the "Badin" in great esteem: "In this manner we see, among the jongleurs, when they arrange between them the cast of a play, the part of the Sot, or Badin, to be attributed to the cleverest and most experienced in their company."

In the meanwhile, common ancestors of the various dramatic tribes, source and origin of many sorts of plays, the Mysteries, which had contributed to the formation of the tragical, romantic, allegorical, pastoral, and comic drama, were still in existence. Reformation had come, the people had adopted the new belief, but they could not give up the Mysteries. They continued to like Herod, Noah and his wife, and the tumultuous troup of devils, great and small, inhabiting hell-mouth. Prologues had been written in which excuses were offered on account of the traces of superstition to be detected in the plays, but conscience being thus set at rest, the plays were performed as before. The Protestant bishop of Chester prohibited the representation in 1572, but it took place all the same. The archbishop of York renewed the prohibition in 1575, but the Mysteries were performed again for four days; and some representations of them took place even later. At York the inhabitants had no less reluctance about giving up their old drama; they were sorry to think that religious differences now existed between the town and its beloved tragedies. Converted to the new faith, the citizens would have liked to convert the plays too, and the margins of the manuscript bear witness to their efforts. But the task was a difficult one; they were at their wits' end, and appealed to men more learned than they. They decided that "the booke shalbe carried to my Lord Archebisshop and Mr. Deane to correcte, if that my Lord Archebisshop do well like theron," 1579. My Lord Archbishop, wise and prudent, settled the question according to administrative precedent; he stored the book away somewhere, and the inhabitants were simply informed that the prohibition was maintained. The York plays thus died.

In France the Mysteries survived quite as late; but, on account of the radical effects of the Renaissance there, they had not the same influence on the future development of the drama. They continued to be represented in the sixteenth century, and the Parliament of Paris complained in 1542 of their too great popularity: parish priests, and even the chanters of the Holy Chapel, sang vespers at noon, a most unbecoming hour, and sang them "post haste," to see the sight. Six years later the performance of Mysteries was forbidden at Paris; but the cross and ladder, emblems of the "Confrères de la Passion," continued to be seen above the gates of the "Hôtel de Bourgogne," and the privilege of the Confrères, which dated three centuries back, was definitely abolished in the reign of Louis XIV., in December, 1676. Molière had then been dead for three years.

In England, at the date when my Lord Archbishop stopped the representation at York, the old religious dramas had produced all their fruit: they had kept alive the taste for stage plays, they left behind them authors, a public, and companies of players. Then was growing in years, in a little town by the side of the river Avon, the child who was to reach the highest summits of art. He followed on week-days the teaching of the grammar school; he saw on Sundays, painted on the wall of the Holy Cross Chapel, a paradise and hell similar to those in the Mysteries, angels of gold and black devils, and that immense mouth where the damned are parboiled, "où damnés sont boulus," as the poor old mother of Villon says in a ballad of her son's.

At the date of the York prohibition, William Shakespeare was fifteen.

CHAPTER VII.

THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

I.

In the autumn of the year 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer, the son of the Thames Street vintner, universally acknowledged the greatest poet of England, had been borne to his tomb in the transept of Westminster Abbey. Not far from him sleep the Plantagenet kings, his patrons, Edward III. and Richard II. wrapped in their golden robes. With them an epoch has drawn to its close; a new century begins, and this century is, for English thought, a century of decline, of repose, and of preparation.

So evident is the decline that even contemporaries perceive it; for a hundred years poets unceasingly mourn the death of Chaucer. They are no longer able to discover new ways; instead of looking forward as their master did, they turn, and stand with eyes fixed on him, and hands outstretched towards his tomb. An age seeking its ideal in the epoch that has just preceded it is an age of decline; so had been in past times the age of Statius, who had professed such a deep veneration for Virgil.

For a century thus the poets of England remain with their gaze fastened on the image of the singer they last heard, and at each generation their voice becomes weaker, like an echo that repeats another echo. Lydgate imitates Chaucer, and Stephen Hawes imitates Lydgate.

Around and below them countless rhymers persist in following the old paths, not knowing that these paths have ceased to lead anywhere, and that the time has come to search for new ones. The most skilful add to the series of English fabliaux, borrowed from France; others put into rhyme, disfiguring them as they go along, romances of chivalry, lives of the saints, or chronicles of England and Scotland. Very numerous, nearly all devoid of talent, these patient, indefatigable word-joiners write in reality, they too, as M. Jourdain, "de la prose sans le savoir."

These poets of the decline write for a society itself on the decline, and all move along, lulled by the same melody to a common death, out of which will come a new life that they can never know. The old feudal and clerical aristocracy changes, disappears, and decays; many of the great houses become extinct in the wars with France, or in the fierce battles of the Two Roses; the people gain by what the aristocracy lose. The clergy who keep aloof from military conflicts are also torn by internecine quarrels; they live in luxury; abuses publicly pointed out are not reformed; they are an object of envy to the prince and of scorn to the lower classes; they find themselves in the most dangerous situation, and do nothing to escape from it. Of warnings they have no lack; they receive no new endowments; they slumber; at the close of the century nothing will remain to them but an immense and frail dwelling, built on the sand, that a storm can blow over.

How innovate when versifying for a society about to end? Chaucer's successors do not innovate; they fasten their work to his works, and patch them together; they build in the shadow of his palace. They dream the same dreams on a May morning; they erect new Houses of Fame; they add a story to the "Canterbury Tales."

A gift bestowed on them by a spiteful fairy makes the matter worse: they are incredibly prolific. All they write is poor, and the spiteful fairy, spiteful to us, has granted them the faculty to write thus, without any trouble, for ever. Up to this day Lydgate's works have baffled the attempts of the most enterprising literary societies; the Early English Text Society has some time ago begun to publish them; if it carries out the undertaking, it will be a proof of unparalleled endurance.

Lydgate and Hoccleve are the two principal successors of Chaucer. Lydgate, a monk of the monastery of Bury St. Edmund's, a worthy man, it seems, if ever there was one, and industrious, and prolific, above all prolific, writes according to established standards, tales, lays, fabliaux satires, romances of chivalry, poetical debates, ballads of former times, allegories, lives of the saints, love poems, fables; five thousand verses a year on an average, and being precocious as well as prolific, leaves behind him at his death a hundred and thirty thousand verses, merely counting his longer works. Virgil had only written fourteen thousand.

He copies Latin, French, and English models, but especially Chaucer, he adds his "Story of Thebes" to the series of the "Canterbury Tales," he has met, he says, the pilgrims on their homeward journey; the host asked him who he was:

I answerde my name was Lydgate,
Monk of Bery, nygh fyfty yere of age.

Admitted into the little community, he contributes to the entertainment by telling a tale of war, of love, and of valorous deeds, in which the Greeks wear knightly armour, are blessed by bishops, and batter town walls with cannon. His "Temple of Glas" is an imitation of the "Hous of Fame"; his "Complaint of the Black Knight" resembles the "Book of the Duchesse"; his "Falle of Princes" is imitated from Boccaccio and from the tale of the Monk in Chaucer. The "litel hevynesse" which the knight noticed in the monk's stories is particularly well imitated, so much so that Lydgate himself stops sometimes with uplifted pen to yawn at his ease in the face of his reader. But his pen goes down again on the paper, and starts off with fresh energy. From it proceeds a "Troy Book, or Historie of the Warres betwixte the Grecians and the Troyans," of thirty thousand lines, where pasteboard warriors hew each other to pieces without suffering much pain or causing us much sorrow; a translation of that same "Pélerinage" of Deguileville, which had inspired Langland; a Guy of Warwick; Lives of Our Lady, of St. Margaret, St. Edmund, St. Alban; a "pageant" for the entry of Queen Margaret into London in 1445; a version of the "Secretum Secretorum," and a multitude of other writings. Nothing but death could stop him; and, his last poem being of 1446, his biographers have unanimously concluded that he must have died in that year.

The rules of his prosody were rather lax. No one will be surprised at it; he could say like Ovid, but for other reasons: "I had but to write, and it was verses." He is ready for everything; order them, and you will have at once verses to order. These verses are slightly deformed, maybe, and halt somewhat; he does not deny it:

I toke none hede nouther of shorte nor longe.

But let us not blame him; Chaucer, his good master, would, he assures us, have excused his faulty prosody, and what right have we to be more severe than Chaucer? To this there is, of course, nothing to answer, but then if we cannot answer, at least we can leave. We can go and visit the other chief poet of the time, Thomas Hoccleve; he does not live far off, the journey will be a short one; we have but to call at the next door.

This other poet is a public functionary; he is a clerk of the Privy Seal; his duties consist in copying documents; an occupation he finds at length somewhat tiresome. By way of diversion he frequents taverns; women wait on him there, and he kisses them; a wicked deed, he admits; but he goes no further; at least so he assures us, being doubtless held back by a remembrance of officialdom and promotion. At all events this little was even too much, for we soon find him sick unto death, rhyming supplications to the god of health, and to Lord Fournivall, another kind of god, very useful to propitiate, for he was Lord Treasurer. He writes a good many detached pieces in which, thanks to his mania for talking about himself, he makes us acquainted with the nooks and corners of the old city, thus supplying rare and curious information, treasured by the historian. He composes, in order to make himself noticed by the king, a lengthy poem on the Government of Princes, "De Regimine Principum," which is nothing but a compilation taken from three or four previous treatises; he adds a prologue, and in it, following the example of Gower, he abuses all classes of society. He does not fail to begin his confession over again: from which we gather that he is something of a drunkard and of a coward, that he is vain withal and somewhat ill-natured.

He had, however, one merit, and, in spite of his defects, all lovers of literature ought to be grateful to him; the best of his works is not his Government of Princes; it is a drawing. He not only, like Lydgate, loved and mourned Chaucer, but wished to keep the memory of his features, and he caused to be painted on the margin of a manuscript the portrait mentioned above, which agrees so well with the descriptions contained in the writings of the master that there is no doubt as to the likeness.

II.

Let us cross the hills, and we shall still find Chaucer; as in England, so is he wept and imitated in Scotland. But the poets live there in a different atmosphere; the imitation is not so close a one; a greater proportion of a Celtic blood maintains differences; more originality survives; the decline is less apparent. The best poets of English tongue, "Inglis" as they call it, "oure Inglis," Dunbar says, are, in the fifteenth century, Scots. Among them are a king, a monk, a schoolmaster, a minstrel, a bishop.

The king is James I., son of Robert III., of the family of those Stuarts nearly all of whom were destined to the most tragic fate. This one, taken at sea by the English, when only a child, remained nineteen years confined in various castles. Like a knight of romance, and a personage in a miniature, he shortened the hours of his captivity by music, reading, and poetry; the works of Chaucer and Gower filled him with admiration. Then he found a better comfort for his sorrows; this knight of miniature and of romance saw before him one day the maiden so often painted by illuminators, the one who appears amidst the flowers and the dew, Aucassin's Nicolette, the Emily of the Knight's Tale, the one who brings happiness. She appeared to the king, not in a dream but in reality; her name was Jane Beaufort, she was the daughter of the Earl of Somerset, and great grand-daughter of John of Gaunt. In her family, too, there were many tragic destinies; her brother was killed at the battle of St. Albans; her three nephews perished in the Wars of the Roses; her grand-nephew won the battle of Bosworth and became king Henry VII. A mutual love sprang up between the two young people, and when James was able to return to Scotland he took back with him his queen of romance, whom he had wedded before the altar of St. Mary Overy's, next to the grave of one of his literary masters, the poet Gower.

His reign lasted thirteen years, and they were thirteen years of struggle: vain endeavours to regulate and centralise a kingdom composed of independent clans, all brave and ready for foreign wars, but quite as ready, too, for civil ones. Assisted by his queen of romance, the knightly poet displayed in this task an uncommon energy, and was, with all his faults, one of the best kings of Scotland. He had many children; one of his daughters became dauphiness of France, and another duchess of Brittany. Towards the end of 1436, he had so many enemies among the turbulent chieftains that sinister prophecies began to circulate; one of them announced the speedy death of a king; and as he played at chess on Christmas eve with a knight surnamed the "king of love," he said to him: "There are no other kings in Scotland save me and you; I take heed to myself, do you likewise." But the king of love had nothing to fear. During the night of the 20th of February, 1437, an unwonted noise was suddenly heard in the courtyard of the monastery of Perth where James lodged; it was Robert Graham and his rebel band. Vainly did the king offer resistance, though unarmed; the foe were too numerous, and they stretched him dead, pierced with sixteen sword wounds.

The constant love of the king for Jane Beaufort had been celebrated by himself in an allegorical poem, imitated from Chaucer: "The King's Quhair," a poem all aglow with bright hues and with the freshness of youth. The prince is in bed at night, and, like Chaucer in his poem of the Duchess, unable to sleep, he takes up a book. It is the "Consolation" of Boethius, and the meditations of "that noble senatoure" who had also known great reverses, occupied his thoughts while the night hours glided on. The silence is broken by the matin bell:

Bot now, how trowe ye? suich a fantasye
Fell me to mynd, that ay me-thoght the bell
Said to me: "Tell on, man, quhat the befell."

And the king, invoking Clio and Polymnia, like Chaucer, and adding Tysiphone whom he takes for a Muse, because he is less familiar with mythology than Chaucer, tells what befell him, how he parted with his friends, when quite a boy, was imprisoned in a foreign land, and from the window of his tower discovered one day in the garden:

The fairest or the freschest yong floure
That ever I sawe.

The maid was so beautiful that all at once his "hert became hir thrall":

A! suete, are ye a warldly creature,
Or hevinly thing in likenesse of nature?

To be cleared from his doubts the royal poet ventures into the kingdom of Venus, and finds her stretched on her couch, her white shoulders covered with "ane huke," a loose dress that Chaucer had not placed upon them. Then he reaches the kingdom of Minerva; and passing through dissertations, beds of flowers, and groups of stars, he returns to earth, reassured as to his fate, with the certitude of a happiness promised him both by Venus and Minerva. A eulogy on Gower and Chaucer closes the poem, which is written in stanzas of seven lines, since called, because of James, "Rhyme Royal."

Blind Harry, the minstrel, sings the popular hero, William Wallace. We are in the midst of legends. Wallace causes Edward I. to tremble in London; he runs extraordinary dangers and has wonderful escapes; he slays; he is slain; he recovers; his body is thrown over the castle wall, and picked up by his old nurse; the daughter of the nurse, nurse herself, revives the corpse with her milk. The language is simple, direct and plain; the interest lies in the facts, and not in the manner in which they are told; and this, to say the truth, is also the case with chap-books.

Blind Harry continues Barbour rather than Chaucer, but Chaucer resumes his rights as an ancestor with Henryson and Dunbar. The former sits with his feet to the fire one winter's night, takes "ane drink" to cheer him, and "Troilus" to while away the time. The little homely scene is described in charming fashion; one seems, while reading, to feel the warmth of the cosy corner, the warmth even of the "drink," for it must have been a warm one:

I mend the fyre, and beikit (basked) me about,
Than tuik ane drink my spreitis to comfort,
And armit me weill fra the cold thairout;
To cut the winter nicht and mak it schort,
I tuik ane quair and left all uther sport,
Writtin be worthie Chaucer glorious
Of fair Cresseid and worthie Troilus.

He read, but unable to understand the master's leniency towards the frail and deceitful woman, he takes pen and adds a canto to the poem: the "Testament of Cresseid," where he makes her die a dreadful death, forsaken by all.

A greater pleasure will be taken in his rustic poems, ballads, or fables. His "Robene and Makyne" is a "disputoison" between a shepherd and shepherdess. Makyne loves Robin, and tells him so; and he accordingly cares not for her. Makyne goes off, her eyes full of tears; but Robin is no sooner left alone than he begins to love:

Makyne, the nicht is soft and dry,
The weddir is warme and fair
And the grene woid rycht neir us by
To walk atour (over) all quhair (everywhere);
Thair ma na janglour us espy
That is to lufe contrair;
Thairin, Makyne, bath ye and I
Unsene we ma repair.

In her turn Makyne is no longer willing; she laughs now, and he weeps, and she leaves him in solitude under a rock, with his sheep. This is a lamentable ending; but let us not sorrow overmuch; on these pathless moors people are sure to meet, and since they quarrelled and parted for ever, in the fifteenth century, Robin and Makyne have met many times.

Another day, Henryson has a dream, after the fashion of the Middle Ages. In summer-time, among the flowers, a personage appears to him,

His hude of scarlet, bordowrit weill with silk.

In spite of the dress he is a Roman: "My native land is Rome;" and this Roman turns out to be Æsop, "poet laureate;" there is no room for doubt: we are in the Middle Ages. Æsop recites his fables in such a new and graceful manner, with such a pleasing mixture of truth and fancy, that he never told them better, not even when he was a Greek slave, and saved his head by his wit.

Henryson takes his time; he observes animals and nature, and departs as much as possible from the epigrammatic form common to most fabulists. The story of the "uplandis Mous and the burges Mous," so often related, has never been better told than by Henryson, and this can be affirmed without forgetting La Fontaine.

The two mice are sisters; the elder, a mouse of importance, established in town, well fed on flour and cheese, remembers, one day, her little sister, and starts off at dusk to visit her. She follows lonely paths at night, creeps through the moss and heather of the interminable Scottish bogs, and at last arrives. The dwelling strikes her as strangely miserable, frail, and dark; a poor little thief like the younger sister does not care much about burning dips. Nevertheless, great is the joy at meeting; the "uplandis mous" produces her choicest stores; the "burges mous" looks on, unable to quite conceal her astonishment. Is it not nice? inquires the little sister. Excuse me, replies the other, but:

Thir widderit (withered) peis and nuttis, or thay be bord,
Will brek my teith and make my wame full sklender....
Sister, this victuall and your royal feist
May well suffice unto ane rurall beist.

Lat be this hole, and cum in-to my place,
I sall to yow schaw be experience
My Gude-fryday is better nor your Pace (Easter).

And off they trot through the bushes, and through those heathery bogs which have by turns charmed and wearied many others besides mice.

They reach the elder sister's. There are delicious provisions, cheese, butter, malt, fish, and dishes without number.

And lordis fair thus couth thay counterfeit,
Except ane thing: thay drank the watter cleir
Instead of wyne; bot yit thay maid gude cheir.

The little sister admires and nibbles. But how long will this last? Always, says the other. Just at that moment a rattle of keys is heard; it is the spenser coming to the pantry. A dreadful scene! The great mouse runs to her hole, and the little one, not knowing where to hide herself, faints.

Luckily, the man was in a hurry; he takes what he came for, and departs. The elder mouse creeps out of her hole:

How fair ye sister? cry peip quhair-ever ye be.

The other, half dead with fright, and shaking in her four paws, is unable to answer. The great mouse warms and comforts her: 'tis all over, do not fear;

Cum to your meit, this perell is overpast.

But no, it is not all over, for now comes "Gilbert" (for Tybert, the name of the cat in the "Roman de Renart"), "our jolie cat"; another rout ensues. This time, perched on a partition where Tybert cannot reach her, the field mouse takes leave of her sister, makes her escape, goes back to the country, and finds there her poverty, her peas, her nuts, and her tranquillity.

The mouse of Scotland has been fortunate in her painters; another, and a still better portrait was to be made of the "wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie," by the great poet of the nation, Robert Burns.

With Gavin Douglas, bishop of Dunkeld, of the illustrious house of the Douglas, earls of Angus, the translator of Virgil, and with William Dunbar, a mendicant friar, favourite of James IV., sent by him on missions to London and Paris, we cross the threshold of a new century; they die in the midst of the Renaissance, but with them, nevertheless, the Chaucerian tradition is continued. Douglas writes a "Palice of Honour," imitated from Chaucer. Dunbar, with never flagging spirit, attempts every style; he composes sentimental allegories and coarse tales (very coarse indeed), satires, parodies, laments. His fits of melancholy do not last long; he must be ill to be sad; however keen his satires, they are the work of an optimist; they end with laughter and not with tears. He is nearer to Jean des Entommeures than to William Langland.

His principal poems, "The Goldyn Targe," on the targe or shield of Reason exposed to the shafts of Love; "Thrissil and the Rois" (thistle and rose) are close imitations of the Chaucer of the "Parlement of Foules" and of the "Hous of Fame," with the same allegories, the same abstract personages, the same flowers, and the same perfumes. The "Thrissil and the Rois," written about 1503, celebrates the marriage of Margaret, rose of England, daughter of Henry VII., to James IV., thistle of Scotland, the flower with a purple crown: that famous marriage which was to result in a union of both countries under the same sceptre.

Endowed with an ever-ready mind and an unfailing power of invention, Dunbar, following his natural tastes, and wishing, at the same time, to imitate Chaucer, decks his pictures with glaring colours, and "out-Chaucers Chaucer." His flowers are too flowery, his odours too fragrant; by moments it is no longer a delight, but almost a pain. It is not sufficient that his birds should sing, they must sing among perfumes, and these perfumes are coloured; they sing

Amang the tendir odouris reid and quhyt.

These are undoubted signs of decline; they are found, in different degrees, among the poets of England and of Scotland, nearly without exception. The anonymous poems, "The Flower and the Leaf," "The Court of Love," &c., imitated from Chaucer, exhibit the same symptoms. The only ones who escape are, chiefly in the region of the Scottish border, those unknown singers who derive their inspiration directly from the people, who leave books alone, and who would not be found, like Henryson, sitting by the fireside with "Troilus" on their knees. These singers remodel in their turn ballads that will be remade after them, and which have come down stirring and touching; love-songs, doleful ditties, the ride of the Percy and the Douglas ("Chevy Chase"), that, in spite of his classic tastes, Philip Sidney admired in the time of Elizabeth. Though declining in castles, poetry still thrills with youth along the hedges and in the copses; and the best works of poets with a name like Dunbar or Henryson are those in which are found an echo of the songs of the woods and moors. This same echo lends its charm to the music of the "Nut-brown Maid," that exquisite love-duo, a combination of popular and artistic poetry written by a nameless author, towards the end of the period, and the finest of the "disputoisons" in English literature.

But apart from the songs the wayfarer hums along the lanes, the works of the poets most appreciated at that time, Lydgate, Henryson, Dunbar, Stephen Hawes, represent a dying art; they write as architects build, and their literature is a florid one; their poems are in Henry VII.'s style. Their roses are splendid, but too full-blown; they have expended all their strength, all their beauty, all their fragrance; no store of youth is left to them; they have given it all away; and what happens to such roses? They shed their leaves; of this past glory there will soon remain nothing save a stalk without petals.

III.

The end of the feudal world has come, its literature is dying out; but at the same time a double revival is preparing. The revival most difficult to follow, but not the least considerable, originated in the middle and lower classes of society. While great families destroy each other, humble ones thrive: only lately has this fact been sufficiently noticed. So long as the historian was only interested in battles and in royal quarrels, the fifteenth century in England was considered by every one, except by that keen observer, Commines, to be the time of the war of the Two Roses, of the murder of Edward's children, and nothing else. It seemed as though the blood of the youthful princes had stained the entire century, and as if the whole nation, stunned with horror, had remained aghast and immobile. Curiosity has been felt in our days as to whether this impression was a correct one, and it has been ascertained to be false. Instead of being absorbed in the contemplation of these dreadful struggles, holding its breath at the sight of the slaughter, the nation paid very little attention to them, and regarded these doings in the light of "res inter alios acta."

Feudalism was perishing, as human organisations often perish, from the very fact of its having attained its full development; feudal nobles had so long towered above the people that they were now almost completely severed from them; feudalism had pushed its principle so far that it was about to die, like the over-blown roses of Dunbar. While the nobles and their followers, that crowd of bravi that the statutes against maintenance had vainly tried to suppress, strewed the fields of Wakefield, Towton, and Tewkesbury with their corpses, the real nation, the mass of the people, stood apart and was engaged in a far different occupation. It strove to enrich itself, and was advancing by degrees towards equality between citizens. A perusal of the innumerable documents of that epoch, which have been preserved and which concern middle classes, leave a decided impression of peaceful development, of loosening of bondage, of a diffusion of comfort. The time is becoming more remote, when some sat on thrones and others on the ground; it begins to be suspected that one day perhaps there may be chairs for everybody. In the course of an examination bearing on thousands of documents, Thorold Rogers found but two allusions to the civil wars. The duration of these wars must not, besides, be exaggerated; by adding one period of hostilities to another it will be found they lasted three years in all.

The boundaries between the classes are less strictly guarded; war helps to cross them; soldiers of fortune are ennobled; merchants likewise. The importance of trade goes on increasing; even a king, Edward IV., makes attempts at trading, and does not fear thus to derogate; English ships are now larger, more numerous, and sail farther. The house of the Canynges of Bristol has in its pay eight hundred sailors; its trading navy counts a Mary Canynge and a Mary and John, which exceed in size all that has hitherto been seen. A duke of Bedford is degraded from the peerage because he has no money, and a nobleman without money is tempted to become a dangerous freebooter and live at the expense of others. For the progress is noticeable only by comparison, and, without speaking of open wars, brigandage, which is dying out, is not yet quite extinct.

The literature of the time corroborates the testimony of documents exhumed from ancient muniment rooms. It gives an impression of a wealthier nation than formerly, counting more free men, with a more extensive trade. The number of books on courtesy, etiquette, good breeding, good cooking, politeness, with an injunction not to take "always" the whole of the best morsel, is a sign of these improvements. The letters of the Paston family are another. In spite of all the mentions made in these letters of violent and barbarous deeds; though in them we see Margaret Paston and her twelve defenders put to flight by an enemy of the family, and Sir John Paston besieged in his castle of Caister by the duke of Norfolk, a multitude of details give something of a modern character to this collection, the oldest series of private English letters we possess.

In spite of aristocratic alliances, these people think and write like worthy citizens, economical, practical and careful. During her husband's absence, Margaret Paston keeps him informed of all that goes on, she looks after his property, renews leases, collects rents. Reading her letters one seems to see her home as neat and clean as a Dutch house. If a disaster occurs, instead of wasting her time in lamentations, she repairs it to the best of her ability and takes precautions for the future. She loves her husband, and may be believed when, knowing him to be ill, she writes: "I would ye were at home, if it were your ease, and your sore might be as well looked to here as it is where ye be, now liefer than a gown though it were of scarlet." John Paston, shut in the Fleet prison, where he makes the acquaintance of Lord Henry Percy, for prisons were then a place where the best society met, sends Margaret playful verses to amuse her:

My lord Persy and all this house,
Recommend them to yow, dogge catte and mowse,
And wysshe ye had be here stille,
For they sey ye are a good gille.

The old and new times are no longer so far apart; in such a prison, Fielding and Sheridan would not have felt out of place.

Books of advice to travellers, itineraries or guides to foreign parts, vocabularies, dictionaries, and grammars, commercial guides, the "Libelle of Englyshe Polycye," are also signs of the times. This last document is a characteristic one; it is a sort of consular report in verse, very similar (the verses excepted) to thousands of consular reports with which "Livres Jaunes" and "Blue Books" have since been filled. The author points out for each country the goods to be imported and exported, and the guileful practices to be feared in foreign parts; he insists on the necessity of England's having a strong navy, and exaggerates the maritime power of rival countries, so that Parliament may vote the necessary supplies. England should be the first on the sea, and able to impose "pease by auctorité." She should establish herself more firmly at Calais; only the word Calais would be altered now and replaced by Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, or the Cape. The author enumerates the products of Prussia, Flanders, France, Spain, Portugal, Genoa, &c.; he has even information on the subject of Iceland, and its great cod-fish trade. He wishes for a spirited colonial policy; it is not yet a question of India, but only of Ireland; at any price "the wylde Iryshe" must be conquered.

He dwells at length on the misdeeds of the wicked Malouins, who are stopped by nothing, obey no one, and are protected by the innumerable rocks of their bays, amidst which they alone know the passages. Conclusion:

Kepte (keep) than the see about in specialle
Whiche of England is the rounde walle;
As thoughe England were lykened to a cité,
And the walle enviroun were the see;
Keep than the see that is the walle of Englond,
And then is Englond kepte by Goddes sonde.

The anxious injunctions scattered in the "Libelle" must not be taken, any more than Parliamentary speeches of later date, as implying that the nation had no confidence in itself. The instinct of nationality, formerly so vague, has grown from year to year since the Conquest: the English are now proud of everything English; they are proud of their navy, in spite of its defects; of their army, in spite of the reverses it suffered; of the wealth of the Commons; they even boast of their robbers. Anything one does should be well done; if they have thieves, these thieves will prove the best in the world. The testimony of Sir John Fortescue, knight, Lord Chief Justice, and Chancellor of England, who must have known about the thieves, is decisive on this point. He writes, in English prose, a treatise on absolute and limited monarchy; admiration for his country breaks out on every page. It is the time of the Two Roses, but it matters little with him; like many others in his day, he does not pay while writing much attention to the Roses. England is the best governed country in the world; it has the best laws; the king can do nothing unless his people consent. In this manner a just balance is maintained: "Our Comons be riche, and therfor they gave to their kyng, at sum tymys quinsimes and dismes, and often tymys other grete subsydyes.... This might thay not have done, if they had ben empoveryshyd by their kyng, as the Comons of Fraunce." Fortescue puts forth a theory often confirmed since then: if the Commons rebel sometimes, it is not the pride of wealth that makes them, but tyranny; for, were they poor, revolts would be far more frequent: "If thay be not poer, thay will never aryse, but if their prince so leve Justice, that he gyve hymself al to tyrannye." It is true that the Commons of France do not rebel (Louis XI. then reigned at Plessis-lez-Tours); Fortescue is shocked at that, and remonstrates against their "lacke of harte."

Some people might say that there are a great many thieves in England. They are numerous, Fortescue confesses, there is no doubt as to that; but the country finds in them one more cause to be proud: "It hath ben often seen in Englond that three or four thefes, for povertie hath sett upon seven or eight true men and robbyd them al." The thieves of France are incapable of such admirable boldness. On this account "it is right seld that French men be hangyd for robberye," says Fortescue, who had never, judging by the way he talks, passed by Montfaucon, nor come across poor Villon; "thay have no hertys to do so terryble an acte. There be therfor mo men hangyd in Englonde in a yere for robberye and manslaughter than their be hangid in Fraunce for such cause of crime in seven yers." As a judge, Fortescue hangs the thieves; as an Englishman he admires their performances: the national robber is superior to all others. An engraving in Punch represents a London drunkard carried off by two policemen; the street boys make comments: "They couldn't take my Father up like that," says one of them, "it takes six Policemen to run him in!" If this boy ever becomes Chief Justice, he will write, in the same spirit, another treatise like Fortescue's.

Thus is popularised in that century the art of prose; the uses made of it are not unprecedented, but they are far more frequent. This is one more sign that the nation settles and concentrates; does not stand on tiptoe, but sits comfortably. Previous examples are followed; there are schools of prose writers as of poets. Bishop Pecock employs Wyclif's irony to defend what Wyclif had attacked; pilgrimages, friars, the possessions of the clergy, the statues and paintings in churches. His forcible eloquence is embittered by sarcasms; he continues a tradition, dear to the English race, and one which, constantly renewed, will come down to Swift and to the humourists of the eighteenth century. Boiling over with passion, he does his best to speak coldly and without moving a finger. Wyclif wants everything to be found in the Bible, and forbids pilgrimages, which are not spoken of in it. But then, says Pecock, we are greatly puzzled, for how should we dare to wear breeches, which the Bible does not mention either? How justify the use of clocks to know the hour? And with great seriousness, in a calm voice, he discusses the question: "For though in eeldist daies, and though in Scripture, mensioun is maad of orologis, schewing the houris of the dai bi the schadew maad bi the sunne in a cercle, certis nevere, save in late daies, was eny clok telling the houris of the dai and nyht bi peise and bi stroke; and open it is that noughwhere in holi scripture is expresse mensioun made of eny suche." Where does the Bible say that it should be translated into English? In the same tone of voice Wyclif had pointed out, in the preceding century, the abuses of the Church; in the same tone of voice the author of "Gulliver" will point out, three centuries later, the happy use that might be made of Irish children as butcher's meat.

The thing to be remembered for the moment is that the number of prose-writers increases. They write more abundantly than formerly; they translate old treatises; they unveil the mysteries of hunting, fishing, and heraldry; they compose chronicles; they rid the language of its stiffness. To this contributes Sir Thomas Malory, with his compilation called "Morte d'Arthur," in which he includes the whole cycle of Britain. The work was published by Caxton, the first English printer, who was also a prose-writer. They even write on love; prose now retaliates upon verse, and trespasses on the domains of poetry.

The diminished importance of the nobles and of the feudal aristocracy, the increased importance of the citizens and of the working class, bring the various elements of the nation nearer to each other, and this fact will have a considerable effect on literature: the day will come when the same author can address the whole audience and write for the whole nation. In a hundred years it will be necessary to take into consideration the judgment of the English people, both "high men" and "low men," on intellectual things; there will stand in the pit a mob whose declared tastes and exigences will cause the most stubborn of the Elizabethan poets to yield. Ben Jonson will be less classic and more English than he would have liked to be; he intended to introduce a chorus into his tragedy of "Sejanus"; the fear of the pit prevented him; he grumbles, but submits. The thrift and the toil of the English peasant and craftsman in the fifteenth century had thus an unexpected influence on literature: they contributed to form an audience for Shakespeare.

IV.

The new times are preparing, in still another manner; the gods are to come down from Olympus and dwell once more among men.

While the ancient literature is dying out, another is growing which is to replace it in France, but which will continue it, transformed and rejuvenated, in England. Rome and Athens will give England a signal, not laws; but this signal is an important one; happy the nations who have heard it; it was the signal for awakening.

In that Italy visited by Chaucer in the fourteenth century, the passion for antiquity goes on increasing; the Latins no longer suffice, the Greeks must be known. Petrarch worshipped a manuscript of Homer, but it was for him a dumb fetish: the fetish has now become a god, and utters oracles that all the world understands. The city of the Greek emperors is still standing, and there letters shine with a last lustre. While the foe is at its gates, it rectifies its grammars, goes back to origins, rejects new words, and revives the ancient language of Demosthenes. Never had the town of Constantine been more Greek than on the eve of its destruction. The fame of its rhetoricians is spread abroad; men come from Italy to hear John Argyropoulos, the Chrysoloras, the famous Chrysococcès, deacon of St. Sophia and chief Saccellary.

But the fatal hour is at hand, the era of the Crusades is over; an irresistible ebb has set in; Christendom draws back in its turn. No longer is it necessary to go to Jerusalem to battle against the infidel; he is found at Nicopolis and Kossovo. The illustrious towns of the Greek world fall one after the other, and the exiled grammarians seek shelter with the literate tyrants of Italy, bringing with them their manuscripts. Some, like Theodore Gaza, have been driven from Thessalonica, and teach at Mantua and at Sienna; others left after the fall of Trebizond.

On the throne of the Paleologues sits Constantine XII., Dragassès. Brusa is no longer the capital of the Turks; they have left far behind them the town of the green mosques, of the great platanes and tombs of the caliphs, they have crossed the Bosphorus and are established at Salonica, Sophia, Philippopolis. Adrianople is their capital for the time being; Mahomet II. commands them. Opposite the "Castle of Asia," Anatoli Hissar, he has built on the Bosphorus the "Castle of Europe," Roumel Hissar, with rose-coloured towers; he is master of both shores.

He approaches nearer to the town, and draws up his troops under the wall facing Europe; he has a hundred and thirty cannon; he opens fire on the 11th of April, 1453. On the 28th of May, the Turks take up their positions for the onset; whilst in Byzantium a long procession of priests and monks, carrying the wood of the true cross, miraculous statues and relics of saints, wends its way for the last time. The assault begins at two o'clock in the morning; part of a wall, near the gate of St. Romanus, falls in; the "Cercoporta" gate is taken. The struggle goes on in the heart of the town; the emperor is killed; the basilica erected by Justinian to Divine Wisdom, St. Sophia, which was in the morning filled with a praying multitude, contains now only corpses. The smoke of an immense fire rises under the sky.

All that could flee exiled themselves; the Greeks flocked to Italy. Out of the plundered libraries came a number of manuscripts, with which Nicholas V. and Bessarion enriched Rome and Venice. The result of the disaster was, for intellectual Europe, a new impulse given to classic studies.

With the glare of the fire was mingled a light as of dawn; its rays were to illuminate Italy and France, and, further towards the North, England also.

INDEX.

Abbeys, ff.

A. B. C., .

Abel, .

Abélard, , .

Abernun, P. d', .

Abraham and Isaac, a play, .

Abstractions, personified, , , .

Achilles, , .

Acta Sanctorum, .

Actors, ff., ff.

Adam, in Anglo-Saxon Bible, , and Eve, ; , a mystery, ff., ff.

Adam, "scriveyn," .

Addison, .

Adgar, .

Adrian IV., pope, , .

Ælfric, , ff., , .

Aelred of Rievaulx, , , , ff.

Æneas the Trojan, , , , see "Enéas."

Æsop, .

Æthelberht, .

Æthelred, .

Æthelstan, , , .

Æthelwold, .

Æthelwulf, .

Aetius, .

Agricola, .

Ailill, .

Aïmer, .

Aix, Albert d', .

Alaric, .

Albin, St., .

Alchemist, in Chaucer, , .

Alcuin, ff., , .

Aldhelm, , his riddles, .

"Alemanni," .

Alexander, romances on, ff.; .

Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, .

Alfred the Great, , , , , life and works, ff.; .

Aliénor of Aquitaine, .

Aliénor of Provence, , .

Allegories, in Roman de la Rose, ff.

Allen, Grant, on Germanic names, , on Norman names, .

Alliteration, in Anglo-Saxon and in French, ff., in Aldhelm, , after the Conquest, ff.; , Chaucer's opinion about, ; , , in Langland, .

Ambrose, companion of Richard Cœur-de-Lion, .

America, discovered, .

Amis and Amile, , .

Ammianus Marcellinus, , .

Anatomy of Abuses, .

Anchoresses, , ff.

Ancren Riwle, ff., , .

Anderida, .

Andreas, , , ff.

Anelida see Complaint.

Angevin England, literature of, Bk. ii. c. ii., iii., iv., ff.; survives in Gower, .

Angle, Sir Guichard d', .

Angles, , , , .

"Angli," .

Anglo-Saxons, their name, , vocabulary, , national poetry, Bk. i. c. iii., ff., Mss. and art of, , , , despondency of, ff., ff., their idea of death, ff., their Christian literature, Bk. i. c. iv., ff., their internal divisions, , how transformed by Norman conquest, ff., , mind and genius of, , , , , Chaucer and the, ff.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, , , , ff., on Hastings, , , on William, ff.

Anne of Bohemia, , ff.

Annebaut, R. d', .

Anselm, St., , , .

Antenor, the Trojan, .

Antigone of Sophocles, .

Antiocheis, .

Antoninus Pius, , .

Apelles, , .

Apollinia, life of St., and drama on, ff.

Apollonius of Tyre, in A.S., .

Appius and Virginia, , .

Aquinas, St. Thomas, .

Arabian Nights, .

Arbois de Jubainville, d', on Celts, ff.

Arc, Joan of, , , .

Architecture, of the Anglo-Saxons, , Norman, , perpendicular, , with "pinnacles," 297; , of Westminster Hall, .

Argentille, .

Argyropoulos, .

Ariosto, , .

Aristotle, , , , , .

"Armachanus," see Fitzralph.

Armenia, .

Armorica, .

"Army," the Danish, .

Arnold, T., on Beowulf, , on Wyclif, .

Art: Henry III.'s style, , , gold and silver tablets, cups, &c., ff., pictures, , , miniatures, , tapestries, , embroidery, , statue from the nude, , painted walls and stained glass, , in Italy, ff., antique, ff., portrait of Chaucer, , , favoured by Plantagenets, ff., tomb of Gower, , Malvern Church, , picture by Fouquet, ff., fresco at Stratford-on-Avon, ; see Architecture, Miniatures.

Arthur, King, early songs on, ; , 113, ; cycle of, ff.; , in Layamon, ff.; , , ff.

Ass, feast of the, .

Asser, , .

Astrée, .

Astrolabe, , , .

Attila, , , .

Aucassin, , , .

Augier, of St. Frideswide's, .

Augustine, comes to England, ff.

Augustus, the emperor, , , .

Aungerville, Sir R., .

Ausonius, .

Avebury, circles at, .

Avesbury, Robert of, , .

Avignon, , , .

Avit, St., bishop of Vienna, .

Ayenbite of Inwyt, .

Aymon, .

Bacchanals, ff.

Bacchus, theatre of, .

Bacon, Roger, , , .

"Badin," on the stage, .

Bailey, Harry, of the "Tabard," ff., ff., .

Balade de bon Conseyl, .

Balduf, .

Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury, , , .

John Ball, priest, , , , , .

Ballads, by Chaucer, , on Griselda, ; ff., by Gower, ff.; , see "Chansons," and Songs.

Ballets, .

Barbour, J., ff., .

Bards, Celtic, .

Barking, Clemence of, .

Barry, Gerald de, on Welshmen, ; , , , , , .

Barry, Richard de, .

Barry, William de, .

Bartholomew, St., life of, in A.S., .

Bartholomew the Englishman, , , , .

Bath, ruins at, , .

"Battle," Bk. ii. c. i., ff.

Battle abbey, ff.

Bavaria, Isabeau of, .

Bayard, a horse, .

Bayeux tapestry, .

Beauchamp, family of, .

Beaufort, Jane, .

Beaumont, Louis de, bishop of Durham, .

Beauty, physical, , Chaucer's idea of, ; , ff.

Beauveau, Pierre de, , .

Becket, St. Thomas, life in French, ; , , ff., , .

Bede, , , life and works, ff., , translated by Alfred, ff.; , .

Bedford, George Neville, duke of, .

Bédier, on fabliaux, .

Bello Trojano, De, .

Beowulf, ff., , , analysis of, ff., compared with Roland, ff.; , , .

Bercheur, Pierre, .

Berger, S., on Bible, .

Berkeley, Edward of, .

Bernard, St., , .

Berners, Dame Juliana, .

Bernlak de Haut Désert, .

Bérou, author of a Tristan, .

Berry, Jean duc de, .

Beryn, tale of, .

Bessarion, , .

Bestiaire d'Amour, .

Bestiaries, , , , , .

Betenham, William, .

Bevis of Hampton, .

Bible, in Anglo-Saxon, ff., by Ælfric, , in English, in French, ; , quoted in Parliament, ff., translated by Wyclif, ff., dramatised, , Pecock on, .

"Bibles," moral works, .

Biblesworth, Walter de, .

Bigod, , .

Biquet, Robert, .

Biscop, Benedict, .

Bishops, warrior, learned, saintly, ff.

Blacke, Anthony, .

Black Prince, , , , , , .

Blanket, of Bristol, .

Blickling Homilies, , ff.

Boccaccio, , , , ff., ff., ff., , ff., .

Body and Soul, debate of, .

Boece, translated by Alfred, , ff.; , , translated by Chaucer, ; , , , .

Bohemia, heresies in, .

Bohemond, of Antioch, .

Böhler, Peter, .

Bohun, , .

Boileau, , .

Boke of Nurture, , of St. Albans, .

Boldensele, William of, .

Bollandus, .

Bonaventure, St., .

Boncuor, William de, .

Boniface, St., , , .

Boniface VIII., .

Book of Cupid, , of the Duchesse, , ff., , of Nurture, , of St. Albans, .

"Börn," .

Bossert, on Tristan, ff.

Bourgogne, Jean de, à la barbe, ff.

Bourse pleine de sens, .

Bozon Nicole, , .

Bracton, H. de, , , .

Bradford-on-Avon, Anglo-Saxon Church at, .

Bradshaigh, lady, .

Bradshaw, on Chaucer, ff.

Bradwardine, archbishop, , .

Brakelonde, Jocelin de, .

Brampton, Thomas, .

Brandan, St., , .

Brantingham, Thomas de, .

Breakspeare, Nicolas, , .

Brescia, Albertano de, , .

Brétigny, peace of, , .

Britain, Celtic, Bk. i. c. i., ff.

Britons, ff., not destroyed by Anglo-Saxons, ff.; , "gentil," , .

Brittany, its literature, , how populated, ; .

Broker, Nicolas, .

Bromyard, John of, .

Brooke, Stopford, , .

Browning, Robert, , and Preface.

Bruce, David, .

Bruce, the, .

Brunanburh, ode on, .

Brunne, see Mannyng.

Brut of Layamon, ff.

Brutus the Trojan, , .

Bukton, .

Bunyan, , , .

Burgundy, Henry of, .

Burnellus, the ass, .

Burns, Robert, .

Burton, Thomas of, .

Bury, Richard of, ff., , , , , .

Byrhtnoth, .

Byron, lord, , .

Cædmon, , , life and works, ff.

Cæsar, on Celts, , , , , on Germans, ; , .

Cain, .

Callisthenes, pseudo, , .

Cambinscan, .

Cambrensis, see Barry.

Cambridge, University of, ff.

Canterbury, Gervase of, .

" Thomas of, .

Canterbury Tales, , , ff., , , , .

Canynges, of Bristol, .

Capet, Hugues, .

Capgrave, , .

Caracalla, .

Carlyle, T., .

Carols, .

Carpenter's Tools, , .

Cartaphilus, .

Castle of Love, .

Castle of Perseverance, .

Castoiement d'un père à son fils, , .

Cathedrals, Norman, ff., , .

Catherine, life of St., , drama on St., ff.

Cato on Gauls, .

Causa Dei, De, .

Caxton, , , , , , , , .

Ceadwalla, .

Celestinus, .

Cecile, St., see Lyf of.

Celts, name, origin, literature, religion of the, ff.; fate after the A.S. conquest, ff., their ideal, , wit and genius, , , in Scotland, .

Cemeteries, dances in, ff.

Cento Novelle Antiche, .

Cervantes, , , , .

Champeaux, Guillaume de, .

Chanson de Roland, ff., ff., , , .

Chansons, French, ff., , sung in London, ff.

Chantecleer, the cock, ff., , ff.

Chanteloup, Walter de, , .

Chantries, ff.

Chap-books, , .

Chapelain, André le, .

Chapu, Guillaume, .

Chardry, .

Charisius, .

Charlemagne, , , ff., , , ; caricatured, ff.; , , .

Charles the Bald, .

Charles V. of France, , , .

" VI. " , .

" V. of Germany, .

Charnay, Henri de, inquisitor, .

Chastoiement des Dames, .

Château d'Amour, .

Chaucer, Alice, .

" Geoffrey, his "somnour," 161; , , , , , , ; life and works, Bk. iii. c. ii., ff., his contemporaries, Bk. iii. c. iii., ff.; ; compared with Langland, ff, ff., , ; , , ; on miracle plays, , , , ; successors and imitators, Bk. iii. c. vii., ff.

Chaucer, John, .

" Philippa, .

" Thomas, , .

"Chaucer Society," .

Cheldric, .

Cheriton, Odo de, .

Chester Plays, ff., their end, .

Chester, Randolf, earl of, .

Chestre, Thomas, .

"Chests," at the University, .

Chettle, .

Chevy Chase, .

Chienne qui pleure, , , ff., ff.

Child, Prof., on ballads, .

Chimneys, .

Chlochilaicus, .

Christ, , .

Christianity, in Roman England, , in Anglo-Saxon England, , , ff.

Christmas, how celebrated, ff., plays, ff.

Chronicles, Anglo-Norman, ff., , Latin, ff., ff., in the XVth century, ff.

Chrysococcès, .

Chrysoloras, .

Church, the English, ff., Wyclif on, ff., ff., decaying in the XVth century, .

Cicero, , .

Cirencester, Richard of, .

Claris Mulieribus, De, .

Clarissa Harlowe, , .

Classic influences and models, , .

Claudian, , .

Claudius the emperor, , .

"Clavilegno," .

Cleges, .

Cleomades, .

Cleopatra, on the stage, .

Clerc, Guillaume le, , .

Clerk of Oxford, Chaucer's, , , ff.

Clerks, slothful, ff., at the University, ff., belong to the Latin country, ff.

Clovis, , a Romanised barbarian, , , .

Cnut the Dane, , , .

Coal mines, .

Cobham, Thomas de, .

Cobsam, Adam de, .

Cochin, H., on Boccaccio, .

Codex Exoniensis, .

Codex Vercellensis, .

Cœnewulf, .

Coggeshall, Radulphus de, , .

Coinci, Gautier de, .

Coins, Anglo-Saxon, .

Cokaygne, .

Cokwolds' Dance, .

Coleridge, S. T., .

Colgrim, .

Colonna, Gui de, .

Columba, St., .

Comedy, scenes of, ff.

Comestor, Pierre,

Cominges, Count de, .

Commines, , .

Commons, of England, ff., , Langland on the, ff.

Complaint of Anelida, , , of a Lover's Life, , unto Pite, , , of the Plowman, , of Venus, , .

Communism, Wyclif on, ff.

Comus, .

Conchobar, ff.

Condé, Baudouin de, .

" Jean de, .

Confessio Amantis, , , ff.

"Confrères de la Passion," , .

Conquest, Norman-French, Bk. ii., ff., silence after the, ff.

Constance, Chaucer's Story of, , , .

Constant du Hamel, .

Constantius Chlorus, .

Constantine the Great, .

Constantine XII., .

Constantinople, taken by the Turks, .

Conte des Hiraus, .

Corbichon, Jean, translates Bartholomew the Englishman, , .

Cook, Captain, .

Cookery, ff., .

Cordier, H., on Mandeville, , .

Corneille, Pierre, , .

Cornelius Gallus, .

Cornelius, Nepos, , .

Cornish drama, .

Cornwall, Celtic, , .

Corpus Christi plays, .

Corpus Poeticum Boreale, ff.

Cotton, Bartholomew de, .

Cotton, John, a painter, .

Councils, on the drama, ff., .

Coupe Enchantée, .

Court, amusements at, ff., fool, ff., dramas, , poetry, ff., ff.

Court of Love, , , .

Courtenay, embroiderer, .

Courtenay, bishop of London, .

Courtesy, books of, ff.

Courtin, Honoré, ambassador, .

Coventry Mysteries and pageants, ff.

Cowper, William, .

Coxe, Brinton, on Bracton, .

Credon, Sir Richard, .

Cressida, ff., see Troilus.

Croniques de London, , .

Cuchulaïnn, ff.

Cursor Mundi, ff., , , .

Cuthberht, , , .

Cuthwine, .

Cycles of France, Rome and Britain, ff.

Cynewulf, , , works and genius of, ff., .

Daisy, praise of the, ff.

Dalila, .

Dame Siriz, ff.

Danes, place names recalling them, ; .

Dante, , , , , , , , , ff., ff., , .

Dares the Phrygian, ff., , , .

David, King, .

Davidson, Ch., on Mysteries, .

Davy Adam, .

Deadly Sins, in Langland, .

Death, Celts' idea of, ff., Greeks', ff., Frenchmen's, ff., Anglo-Saxons', ff., , Rolle of Hampole's, , Black Prince's, ; an occasion for jokes, , on the stage, , .

Débat des Hérauts de France et d'Angleterre, .

Decameron, , ff., .

Defoe, , , .

Degrevant, .

Deguileville, , , .

Dekker, .

Delisle, Leopold, on Bartholomew the Englishman, .

Des Champs, Eustache, , , on Chaucer, , on diplomatic service, ; , , .

Deor, , .

Departed Soul's Address, .

Derdriu, ff.

Dermot, .

Despencer, Henry le, bishop of Norwich, .

Devil, described by Ælfric, , and St. Dunstan, , tempts Rolle of Hampole, , on the stage, , .

Dialect, of Chaucer, ff., of Langland, , Scotch, .

Dialogues, in Celtic Literature, ff., in Anglo-Saxon, , in Latin, , , in Troilus, ; , ff., after dinner, , in interludes, ff., in pageants, ff., in Mysteries, ff., in Roman de la Rose, .

Dialogus de Scaccario, .

Diceto, Radulph de, .

Dictys of Crete, ff.

Diderot, .

Dido (in Chaucer), .

Dietrich, .

Digby Mysteries, ff.

Diodorus Siculus, .

"Dirige," .

Disobedient Child, .

"Disputoisons" or Debates, , , ff.

Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum, .

"Doctors," ff.

Dogmas, attacked by Wyclif, , ff.

Domesday Book, , ff., .

Dominicans, ff.

"Dominium" Fitzralph and Wyclif on, .

Domitius Afer, .

Donatus, .

Dormi Secure, .

Douglas, Gavin, .

"Dowel, Dobet, Dobest," ff., , , .

Dragons and monsters, , ff.

Drama, Bk. iii. c. vi., ff.; civil 439 ff., religious, ff.

Dramatic genius of the Celts, .

Dreams, Chaucer and Addison on, , Davy's, , Gower's, , poets', .

Dresemius, S., .

Druids, ff.

Dryden, .

Duchesse, see Book of.

Dujon, see Junius.

Dunbar, , , , life and works, , .

Dunstable, play at, .

Dunstan, St., ff., , , .

Durham, Simeon of, .

" William of, .

Duries, J., a scribe, .

Duties of a Parish Priest, .

Eadgar child, .

Eadmer, .

Eadwine's Canterbury Psalter, .

Eadwine, earl, .

Ealdred, archbishop of York, .

Ealwhine (Alcuin), .

Earle, on A.S. Literature, , on Beowulf, , on A.S. Chronicle, .

Easter, origin of the name, , drama, ff.

Ecgberht, .

Ecgferth, .

École des Maris, .

Edda, ff.

Edgar, king, , ff.

Edgeworth, Miss, .

Edmund, St., , .

Edrisi, .

Eduini, king, .

Edward, king, the confessor, , , life of, in French, ; .

Edward I., , , , , .

" II., , , , , , , , , , .

Edward III., , , , , , , , , , ff., , , .

Edward IV., ff.

Eginhard, , .

Eglamour, .

Ekkehard, .

Elene, ff.

Elizabeth, queen, .

" wife of Lionel son of Edward III., .

Eloi, St., .

Enéas, .

England, first inhabitants of, ff., between northern and southern civilisations, ff., described by Robert of Gloucester, , "merry," , , , , , to the English, Bk. iii., ff., trade and navy of, ff., Chaucer's, ff., threatening and threatened, , , Langland's, ff., , parliamentary, ff.

"Englescherie," presentment of, .

English, literature, under Norman and Angevin kings, ff., revived, ; use of, by upper classes, ff., authors adopt French tastes, ff., fusion of, with French, ff., people, how formed, ff., Chaucer's, , Gower's, , used in Parliament, ff., Wyclif's, , dramas, ff., spoken in Scotland, , pride, .

Enoch, , .

Eostra, the goddess, .

Epinal Glossary, .

Erceldoune, Thomas of, his prophecies, .

Estorie des Engles, ff.

"Estrifs," , , see Disputoisons.

Eulogium Historiarum, .

Euphuism, .

Eutrope, .

Everyman, .

"Exempla,"

ff., ff.

Exeter, Joseph of, , ff., , .

Eyck, van, .

Eyrum, Robert de, .

Fables, Latin, , by Lydgate, , by Henryson, ff.

"Fabliaux," French, , ff., Latin, , , English, ff., , ff., turned into dramas, , of the XVth century, , .

Fahlbeck, on Geatas, .

Falle of Princes, ff.

Fals Semblant, ff., .

Falstofe, Sir J., .

Fame, see Hous of.

Fantosme, Jordan, .

Fasciculi Zizaniorum, , , , .

Fashions, , ridiculed, .

Fates of the Apostles, .

Ferumbras, .

Fielding, H., , , .

Figaro, , .

"File," .

Filocopo, .

Filostrato, , ff.

Finsburg, song on the battle of, .

Fitzosbern, William, .

Fitzralph, Richard, , ff.

Fitzstephen, , .

Fitzwarin, Fulke, .

Fleta, .

Floire and Blanchefleur, , .

Florence, mediæval, ff., plague at, .

Flower and Leaf, , .

Foix, Gaston Phébus de, ff.

Foliot, Gilbert, .

Fontevrault, royal tombs at, .

Fools, feast of, .

Forme of Cury, .

Fortescue, Sir John, .

Fouquet, Jean, picture by, ff.

Four Elements, .

Four Sons of Aymon, .

Fournival, Richard de, .

Fournivall, lord, .

Fox, George, .

Fox and Wolf, ff., .

Fozlan, Ahmed Ibn, .

Fragonard, .

France, first inhabitants of, ff., a home for fabliaux, ; satirised, , see French.

France, Marie de, see Marie.

Franciade, , .

Francis, St., of Assisi, , .

Francis, St., of Sales, .

Francis I., King of France, , .

Franciscans, ff., .

Francus the Trojan, .

Franklin, Chaucer's, , , ff.

Franks, , , , , in Beowulf, , , loved by Christ, .

Freeman, Prof., .

French, invasion, Bk. ii., ff., followers of William, , families and manners, , literature under Norman and Angevin kings, Bk. ii. c. ii., ff.; language, in general use, ff., at Court and in Parliament, , ff., character, ff., ideal, ff., taught at the University, , not known by the "lowe men," ; used by English authors, ff., ff.; fusion of the, with the English, Bk. iii. c. i., ff., in the courts of law, ff., at Oxford, , disuse of, ff., in diplomatic relations, ff., survival of, ff., Chaucer studies, , spoken by Richard II. and Gaston de Foix, , words in Chaucer, ff., used by the Black Prince, ff., songs, , Gower's, , ff., Langland's 377, , Mandeville in, , not used by Christ, , of kings in Mysteries, .

Friar, Chaucer's, , , ff., Diderot's, , derided, , Langland's, , ff., .

Friday, "chidden," , .

"Friend of God of the Oberland," .

Frisians, , , in Beowulf, ; .

Fritzsche, on Andreas, .

Froissart, , , , , , , ff., , compared with Chaucer, ff.; , ff., .

Furnivall, F. J., founder of the Early English Text Society, Chaucer, and Wyclif Society, &c., on Chaucer's tales, ff.

Gaddesden, John of, .

Gaddi, Taddeo, .

Gaillard, Claude, .

Gaimar, ff., , .

Galen, , .

Galois, Jean le, .

Gamelyn, tale of, .

Games, , ff., .

Gascoigne, the theologian, .

Gaunt, John of, Duke of Lancaster, , ff., , , , .

Gauvain, , .

Gawayne and the Green Knight, , ff.

Gaytrige, John, .

Gaza, Theodore, .

Geatas, ff.

Genesis and Exodus in English, .

"Genius," .

Genseric, .

Geoffrey, abbot of St. Albans, his play, ff.

Geoffrey the grammarian, .

Gerald, see Barry.

Gerda, .

Gering, H., on Gretti, .

Germans, origin, manners, religion, war-songs of the, ff., compared with the Celts, ff.

Gerson, .

Gesta Regum Anglorum, .

Gesta Romanorum, , , ff., , .

Gibbon, .

Gildas, , .

Gilds, perform religious plays, .

Giotto, ff., , ff., .

Giraldus Cambrensis, see Barry.

Gladstone, W. E., on University life, .

Glanville, Ralph, .

Glascurion, .

"Globe," the, .

Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke of, , , .

Gloucester, Robert of, ff., , , , , .

Gloucester, Thomas, Duke of, , , .

Goethe, .

Grosseteste, Robert, , , , , , ff., .

Goldborough, .

Golias, .

Gollancz, , , , .

Gombert, , .

Gospels, copied by Anglo-Saxons, , in A.S., , in French, .

Gower, John, , , , , , , , , , life and works, ff., compared with Langland, ff., ff., .

Gower, Sir Robert, .

Graal, quest of the, .

Graham, Sir Robert, .

Grammar, A.S. and English, .

Granson, O. de, .

"Graund Amoure," , .

Graystanes, Robert de, .

Greek classics, ff.

Green, Mrs., on XVth century trade and navy, .

Gregory of Tours, .

Gregory the Great, St., ; translated by Alfred, ff.; , .

Gregory IX., , ff., .

Grein's Bibliothek, , .

Grendel, ff., .

Greteham, Robert of, , .

Gretti and Beowulf, .

Grignan, Madame de, .

Grim, of Grimsby, .

Grimbold, .

Grindecobbe, .

Griselda, , , , ff., , .

Grosvenor, Sir Robert, .

Grueber (and Keary) on A.S. coins, .

Gudrun, Queen, .

Guesclin, Du, , .

Guinevere, Queen, ff.

Guiron, lay of, .

Guiscard, Robert, .

Gulliver, .

Gunnar, ff.

Güterbock on Bracton, .

Guthrum, .

Guy of Warwick, ff., , .

Hacon, King, .

Hadrian, .

Haigh, D. H., on Beowulf, .

Hales, Alexander of, .

" Thomas of, .

Hali Meidenhad, .

Hamlet, .

Hampole, Rolle of, , life and works, ff.; .

Handlyng Synne, , .

Hardy, Sir T. D., on Matthew Paris, .

Hardyng, .

Harold, Godwinson, ff., .

Harold Hardrada, ff.

Harrowing of Hell, , .

Harry, Blind, the minstrel, ff.

Hartley, Mrs., the actress, .

Hastings, battle of, Bk. ii. c. i., ff.

Haughton, .

Hauréau, on G. de Vinesauf, .

Hauteville, Jean de, .

Havelok, lay of, , .

Hawes, Stephen, , .

Hawkwood, Sir J., , .

Hebenhith, Thomas de, .

Hector of Troy, .

Helen of Troy, .

Heliand, .

Hell, painted by Giotto, , represented at Torcello, , described, , besieged, , in Mysteries, , painted at Stratford-on-Avon, .

Helwis, .

Hemingburgh, Walter of, .

Hengest, , , .

Hengham, Judge, .

Henry I., Beauclerc, .

Henry II. of England, , , , , , , , , , , , .

Henry III., ff., , , , , , , .

Henry IV., , , , , .

Henry V., .

Henry VII., , , , .

Henry VIII., , , .

Henryson, , ff., .

Henslowe, Philip, .

Hereford, Nicolas de, .

Hereward, .

Hermit who got drunk, .

Herod, King, , , , , , ff.

Herrtage, on Gesta Romanorum, .

Hervieux, on fabulists, .

Heyroun, Thomas, .

Heywood, Thomas, .

Higden, Ralph, , , , , .

Higelac (in Beowulf), ff.

Hilary, his Latin plays, .

Hilda, abbess of Streonshalch, , .

Hildgund, .

Hincmar, of Reims, .

Hippocrates, .

Hirdboc, .

Historia Anglorum, .

Historia ecclesiastica of Bede, ff., of Orderic Vital, .

Historia Novorum, .

Historia Regum Britannia, ff.

Histrions, ff.

Hniflungs (Niblungs), .

Hoccleve, , , , , life and works, .

Hohlfield, on Mysteries, .

Holinshed, .

Holkot, Robert, .

Holy-Church, in Langland, .

Holy-Grail, .

Homer, , ff., , , , .

Homilies, English, .

Honecourt, Villard de, .

Hood, Robin, , , .

Horace, on Gauls, ; , .

Horn, .

Horsa, , .

Horstmann, on Lives of Saints, .

Houghton, Adam, .

Hous of Fame, , , , ff., , , .

Hoveden, Roger de, , , .

Hrothgar, in Beowulf, ff.

Hübner, baron de, .

Hugh, St., bishop of Lincoln, .

Hugo, Victor, .

Hugolino, , .

Hugon, of Constantinople, .

Humour, Chaucer's, ff., Wyclif's, ff., Pecock's, .

Hundred Years' War, .

Hungerford, Sir Thomas, .

Huntingdon, Henry de, , , , , ff.

Huntingdon, earl of, .

Huon de Burdeux, .

Hus, John, .

Iceland, its literature, ff.

Image du Monde, .

Inferno, .

Ingelend, .

Innocent III., , , , .

Innocent IV., .

Innocents, feast of, .

Invasions, Germanic, Bk. i. c. ii., ff., Scandinavian, ff., Frankish, , , Anglo-Saxon, ff., Danish, ff., French, Bk. ii., ff.

Ipomedon, .

Ireland, its literature, ff., monks from, ; .

Irish language and literature, ff., at the University, ff.

Iscanus, .

Iseult, , see Tristan.

Isle of Ladies, , .

Isumbras, .

Italy, models from, copied by Chaucer, ff., travels in, ff., early Renaissance in, ff.

Itineraries, .

Ivain, .

Jacquerie, .

Jacques le Fataliste, .

James, St., .

James I. of Scotland, , ff.

" IV. " , .

Jarrow, monastery of, .

Jerome, St., , , .

Jessopp, Dr., on Matthew Paris, .

Jew, Wandering, .

Jews, saved, , , .

John the Baptist, St., .

John, King, Lackland, , , .

John, King of France, , .

John, the Saxon, .

Johnson, Dr., .

Joinville, .

Jonathan Wild, .

Jonathas, the Jew, .

Jones, Inigo, .

Jongleur, d'Ely, .

Jonson, Ben, , .

Joseph and Mary, , , as a workman, .

Joseph of Arimathea, , .

Judas, .

Judith, , , .

Jugglers, ff.

Julian the Apostate, .

Juliana, .

Julleville, Petit de, on Mysteries, ff.

Junius (F. Dujon), .

Jurists, ff.

Justinian, , , , .

Jutes, ff., .

Kaines, Ralph de, .

Kaluza, on Romaunt of the Rose, .

Keary, C. F., on Vikings, , on coins, , on Danish place-names, .

Kellawe, Richard de, .

Kenelm, St., .

Kent, Eustache or Thomas of, .

Kent, John, .

"King and Queen," Game of the, .

King Horn, .

King's Quhair, ff.

Kings, Wyclif on, .

Kitredge, on Troilus.

Kitsun, .

Knight, Chaucer's, , , , , .

Knighton, on Wyclif, .

Knights, in Langland, .

Knyvet, John, , .

Koch, on Chaucer, .

Kölbing, on romances, .

La Calprenède, .

Lactantius, .

La Fontaine, , , , , , , , , .

Lai de l'Oiselet, .

Lai du Cor, .

Lamartine, .

Lament for the Makaris, .

Lancaster, Blanche, duchess of, ff.

Lancaster, Henry of, , , see Henry IV.

Lancaster, see Gaunt.

Lancaster, Isabella of, .

Lancelot of the Lake, ff., , .

Landscapes, in Anglo-Saxon literature, , ff., ff., ff., , 92; in Renart, , in Chaucer, , , Scotch, , ff., Shakespeare's, .

Lanfranc, , .

Lang, Andrew, on Aucassin, .

Lange, C., on Easter, .

Langland, William, , , , , , , life and works, Bk. iii. c. iv., ff.; , , .

Langlois, on Roman de la Rose, .

Langtoft, Peter de, , , .

Langton, Stephen, , , .

Lapidaire, .

Latimer, Hugh, .

Latin, in Roman Britain, , in A.S. Britain, ff., in France, , in England after the Conquest, Bk. ii. c. iii., ff., used by summoners, , poems, ff., fables, , romances and tales, ff., treatises 188 ff., chronicles 197 ff., despatches, , models of Chaucer, ff., Gower's, ff., Langland's, , survival of, , chroniclers, ff.; Wyclifs, ff.; ;dramas, ff., , .

Latini, Brunetto, , .

Latymer, impeached, .

Lauchert, on Physiologus,

"Laudabiliter," bull, .

Launfal, .

Lavoix, H., on mediæval music, .

Laws, Welsh, , A.S., , Roman, Anglo-Norman and English, .

Lay, of Guiron, , of Havelok, .

Layamon, ff., , , .

Lazarillo de Tormes, .

Leechdoms, A.S., .

Legende of Good Women, , , .

Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliæ, De, .

Leo IV., Pope, .

Leovenath, .

Letters of the Paston family, .

Leven, Hugues of, .

Lewis, son of Chaucer, .

Lewis, John, on Wyclif, .

Lex Salica, .

Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, ff.

Liber Festivalis, .

Libraries, ff., , .

Lincoln cathedral, .

Lindbergh, John of, .

Lindner on Romaunt of the Rose, .

Lionne, Hugues de, .

L'Isle, Alain de, .

Lison, Richard de, .

"Littus Saxonicum," , .

Lives of Saints, in A.S., , by Ælfric, , in French, ff., in English, , , by Lydgate, .

Lodbrok, Ragnar, .

Logeman, on A.S. reliquary, .

Logic, taught in the Universities, .

Loki, , .

Lollards, , ff.

"Lollius," .

Lombards, , , , , .

London, mediæval, ff., Chaucer's life in, ff., pageants in, ff., Mysteries, .

London Lickpeny, .

Lonelich, .

Longchamp, William de, ff., , .

Lorens, friar, , , .

Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, .

Lorris, Guillaume de, ff., .

Loserth, on Hus, .

Lot, J., .

Louis VII. of France, .

Louis IX. " , .

Louis XI. " .

Louis XIV. " , , .

Lounsbury, on Chaucer, .

Love, in Irish literature, ff., in Scandinavian literature, , in Tristan, ff., in Arthurian poems, ff., as a ceremonial, , in chansons, ff., in Latin tales, ff., in English songs, , poems by Chaucer, ff., , by Froissart, ff., in Roman de la Rose, ff., in Boccaccio, , , in Chaucer's Troilus, 301 ff., in Gawayne, , songs, , in Gower, ff., ff., in Langland, , , in the early drama, , in Mary Magdalene, ff., "king of," , in King's Quhair, ff., written about in prose, .

"Lowe men," their English, ff., and their French, ff.

Lowell, on Chaucer, .

Lucanus, on Druids, ; , , .

Lumière des laïques, .

Lutterworth, , .

Lydgate, , , , , life and works, ff.; , , .

Lyf of Seinte Cecile, , , , .

Mabinogion, , .

Macaulay, .

Mac Datho's Pig, .

Machault, , .

Machinery, stage, ff.

Macpherson, .

Mael Duin, .

Magnyfycence, .

Mahomet, , .

Mahomet II., .

Maidstone, Richard of, , ff.

Maldon, battle of, .

Male règle de T. Hoccleve, .

Malmesbury, William of, , ff., , on Arthurian legends, ff., , .

Malmesbury, Monk of, .

Malory, Sir Thomas, , .

Malvern, ff., ff., .

Mandeville, Sir John, , ff.

Manière de Langage, .

Mantel Mautaillé, .

Mannyng, Robert, of Brunne, , , , .

Manuel des Pechiez, , , ff.

Manuscripts, A.S., , purchased for the king, , rich, , , of the Roman de la Rose, , of Chaucer, , of Gawayne, .

Map, Walter, , life and works, ff.

Marcel, Etienne, .

Marcol, .

Mare, Peter de la, , Thomas de la, .

Maréchal, William le, .

Margaret, queen of Scotland, .

Marguerite, la, poems on, .

Marie de France, ff., , .

Marisco, Adam de, , .

Marivaux, .

Marlowe, .

Marseilles, king of, ff.

Martin, St., of Tours, , , .

Mary, see Virgin.

Mary Magdalen, St., .

Mary Magdalene, a drama, , ff., .

"Masks," .

Mass, caricatured, .

Massinger, .

Matthew, F. D., on Wyclif, , .

Matthew, see Paris.

Maupassant, Gui de, .

Maximinus, emperor, .

May plays, .

May songs, .

Measure, sense of, ff., .

Medicine, .

Medwall, .

Meed, Lady, ff., .

Melibeus, tale of, , , , .

Ménagier de Paris, .

Merchant of Venice, Latin sketch of, ff.

Merchants, English, their wealth, , fond of art, ff., Chaucer's, , , fond of songs, ff., Gower's, , Langland's, ff., , of London, , at the play, .

Mérimée, .

Merlin, , .

Merovingians, in Beowulf, .

Metalogicus, ff.

Meun, Jean de, , ff.

Meyer, Kuno, .

Meyer, Paul, on Alexander the Great, , on Brut, .

Miller, Chaucer's, , , , , , .

Milton, , , , .

Mimes, ff.

Miniatures, A.S., ; , attributed to Matthew Paris, ff.; , , , , , , , by Fouquet, ff.; in the MS. of the Valenciennes Passion, ; .

Minot, Laurence, ff.

Minstrels, , ff., in Langland, ; , ff., high and low, ff.

Miracle plays, .

Miracles de Notre Dame, .

Miraclis pleyinge, treatise on, ff., .

Mireio, .

Mirk, .

Miroir de Justice, .

Minstral, .

Moktader, Caliph Al, .

Molière, , , , , , .

Monasteries, their wealth, ; , literary work in, ff., Wyclif on, .

Monk, Chaucer's, , , , .

Monmouth, Geoffrey of, , life and works, ff., , .

Monsters, in A.S. literature, , ff., .

Montaigne, , .

Monteflor, Paul de, .

Montesquieu, .

Montfort, Simon de, , .

Moral Ode, .

Moralities, , ff.

Moravian Brethren, .

Morgan the fairy, , .

Morley, John, .

Morris, William, .

Morte Arthure, , , .

Moubray, John de, .

Mous, uplandis, ff.

Mowbray, family of, .

Müntz, on Renaissance, .

Musset, Alfred de, , , , , , .

Mysteries, , , ff., decay of, ff., French, their end, .

Napier, on Ormulum, .

"Nature," her discourses, , .

Nature, an interlude, .

Naturis Rerum, De, , .

Navy, German and Scandinavian, ff., Alfred's, , English, ff., in the XVth century, , ff.

Neckham, Alexander, .

Nennius, , .

Netlau, .

Netter, Thomas, .

Neville, impeached, .

Nevilles, family of the, .

Newbury, William of, , .

Nibelungenlied, , .

Niblungs, , .

Nicholas V., .

Nicholson, E. B., on Mandeville, .

Nithard, .

Noah, his ark, , his wife, ff.

Norfolk, men of, .

Normans, of France, Bk. ii. c. i., ff., their turn of mind, , .

Norsemen, .

Northgate, Michel of, .

Nova Poetria, ff.

Nugis Curialium, De, ff., ff.

Nunant, Hugh de, ff.

Nut-brown Maid, .

"Oblar," .

Ockham, , .

Octa, .

Octavian, .

Odo, Bishop, , .

Œdipus, .

Oesterley, on Gesta Romanorum, , .

Offa, , , .

Ogier, , .

Ohthere, travels of, ff.

"Old English," .

Oliver (and Roland), , , .

"Ollam," .

Orcagna, .

Orléans, Charles d', .

Ormin, .

Ormulum, .

Orosius, , translated by Alfred, ff.

Orpheus, history of, told by Alfred, ff.; .

Osric, King, .

Ossa, .

Ossian, .

Otia Imperialia, .

Otuel, .

Ovid, , , , , , , .

Owl and Nightingale, , .

Oxenede, John of, .

Oxford, University of, , ff., , and Wyclif, ff., council of, , lollardry at, ; bacchanals at, .

Pageants, ff., ff.

Palace of Honour, .

Palladius on Husbondrie, .

Palmieri, villa, .

Pamphilus, .

Pandarus, ff.

Panurge, .

Pardoner, Chaucer's, , , ; .

Parfait, the brothers, .

Paris, University of, ff.

Paris, Alexander de, .

Paris, Gaston, , , .

Paris, Matthew, , , , , , ff., , ff.

Parlement of Foules, .

Parliament, churchmen in, , institution and authority of, ff., "good," , ; Chaucer in, , Langland on, , ff., sittings and debates, ff.

Parodies, ff.

Parson, Chaucer's, , , , , , , Langland's, .

Paston Letters, ff.

Patient Grissil, .

Patrick, St., .

Patroclus, .

Paul, St., , his vision, , , ; , .

Paul, monk of Caen, .

Pauli, on Alfred the Great, .

Pearl, ff.

Peasants, aspirations and revolt of, , ff., , ff., , reach heaven, , in the XVth century, .

Pechiez, see Manuel.

Peckham, Pierre de, .

Pecock, Bishop, ff.

Pedro the cruel, .

Pélerinage de Charlemagne, ff.

Penthesilea, Queen, .

Pepin, .

Percival, , , .

Percy, Bishop, .

Percy, Lord Henry, , .

Pericles, .

Perrault, on Griselda, .

Perrers, Alice, , , , , .

Peter, St., .

Peterborough, pseudo Benedict of, .

Petite Philosophie, .

Petrarch, , , , ff., meets Chaucer (?) , ; , , , , , .

Petronius, .

Pharaoh, ff.

Philip III., of France, .

Philip le Bel, " 193.

Philip VI., " , .

Philippa of Hainaut, Queen, .

Philippa Chaucer, ff.

Philobiblon, ff.

Philpot, John, , , .

Phœnix, ff.

Physiologus, ff.

Piers Plowman, ff., .

Pilate, , ff., his wife, .

Pilgrims, Canterbury, ff., Langland's, ff.

Pinte, the hen, .

Pisa, mediæval, .

Pisa, Andrew of, , Nicholas of, , William of, .

Pisan, Christina de, , .

Pizzinghe, Jacopo, .

"Placebo," .

Plantagenet, Geoffrey, archbishop of York, ff.

Players, ff., ff., .

Plays, Bk. iii. c. vi., ff.

Plegmund, .

Pliny, , , .

Plowman's Crede, Complaint, &c., ff.

Poggio, .

Poictiers, John of, , William of, , .

Pole, Michel de la, , William de la, .

Policraticus, ff.

Poliziano, .

Polo, Marco, , .

Poole, R. Lane on Wyclif, ff.

Pope, the, William blessed by, , and Norman kings, , gives Ireland to Henry II., , derided, , suzerainty of, over England, , appeals to, , and the University, , ff., praised by Geoffrey of Vinesauf, , revenues of, drawn from England, , receives presents from Edward II., , has no peer, , Langland on, , Commons hostile to, , and Wyclif, ff., on drama, ff., and king, .

Pordenone, Odoric de, .

Porto, county of, .

Powell, York, .

"Præmunire," .

Praise of Peace, .

Prest, Godfrey, .

Pricke of Conscience, .

Pride of Life, .

"Priests, simple or poor," Wyclif's, ff.

Priests at the play, ff.; .

Prioress, Chaucer's, , , .

Priscian, .

Processions, , , ff.

Proprietatibus Rerum, De, .

Prose, A.S., ff., English, ff., of Rolle of Hampole, , Chaucer's, 337, ; XIVth century, Bk. iii. c. v., ff., English, compared with French, ff., Wyclif's, ff., Sir John Fortescue's, ff., Pecock's, , Malory's, , Caxton's, .

Prosody, English, after the Conquest, , , Chaucer's, , Lydgate's, , Hoccleve's, .

Prothesilaus, .

Proverbs of Alfred, .

Provins, Guiot de, .

"Provisors," .

Pryderi, .

Psalter, A.S., , , French, , English, , .

"Pui" of London, ff., .

Puiset, Hugh de, ff., .

Punch, .

Purgatorio, , .

Puritans, , , , , .

Purvey, J., .

Pytheas, , .

Quenouille de Barberine, .

Quinctilian, .

Quintus Curtius, .

Racine, Jean, .

Rabelais, , , , , , , , , , .

Reason, speech of, .

Recluse women, ff.

Reformation, , , , , and the drama, ff.

Regimine Principum, De, ff.

Regula Pastoralis, .

Remi, bishop of Lincoln, .

Renaissance, early in Italy, ff.; ,

, , ff.

Renan, E., .

Renart, see Roman de.

Repressor, Pecock's, .

Resurrection, Mystery of the, .

"Reverdies," .

"Rhyme Royal," .

Rhys on Celts, .

Rhys ap Theodor, .

Richard Cœur-de-Lion, , , , , praised by Geoffrey de Vinesauf, , ; .

Richard II., , , , ff., , , , , , , , ff., , , ff., .

Richard, bishop of London, .

Richard, canon of Holy Trinity, .

Richard the Redeless, , .

Richardson, Samuel, , .

Richenda, sister of W. de Longchamp, ff.

Riddles, A.S. and Scandinavian, .

Rigaud, Eudes, .

Rishanger, William, .

Robene and Makyne, .

Robert the Devil, , .

Robinson Crusoe, , .

Rocamadour, .

Roet, Sir Payne, ; Catherine, .

Rogers, Thorold, .

Roland, ff., , , , , , , , , , see Chanson de.

Rollo, .

Rolle, see Hampole.

Rolls, Master of the, Chronicles ed. under his direction, .

Roman, conquest of Britain, ff.; remains, ff.; law, .

Roman de la Rose, , , , ff., English translation of, ff., 280, ; , , , , .

Roman de Renart, , , ff., , , , .

Roman de Rou, , .

Roman de Thèbes, .

Roman de Troie, ff.

Romances, French, ff., caricatured, , , ; English, ; read by Chaucer, .

Rome, sends monks to England, ff., notion of Church and State, derived from, ff., ties with, ff.; , blamed, , religious life in, , Langland on, , encroachments of, ; .

Romulus, .

Ronsard, , , .

Rood, A.S., dream of the, , legends of the, .

Rose, see Roman de la.

Rossetti, on Troilus, .

Rotelande, Hue de, , , .

Rothschild, Baron James de, on Mysteries, .

Round Table, , .

Rufinus, Map's friend, .

Ruin, .

Runes, , , .

Russell, John, .

Rutebeuf, .

Ruthwell cross, .

Rymenhild, .

Rysshetoun, Nicholas de, .

Sachs, Hans, .

Sacrament, play of the, , .

Sad Shepherd, .

Sagas, ff.

St. Albans, "Scriptorium" of, ; chronicles of, , ff.; copies burnt, .

St. David's, , , .

St. Josaphaz, .

St. Paul's Cathedral, , , , , .

Sainte Madeleine, .

Sainte More, Benoit de, , , , , , , .

Saladin, , .

Salisbury, John of, , , on Paris University, ff., life and works, ff., on jugglers, , .

Salomon and Saturnus, , .

Sanxay, ruins at, .

Saracens, saved, ; , .

Sarr, Ralph de, .

Sarradin, on Des Champs, .

Satan, in A.S. poems, .

Satires and satirical poems, French, ff., Latin, ff., English, ff., , by Langland, ff., ff., by Dunbar, .

"Saturnalia," , .

Saxons, ff., , .

Scandinavian Literature, ff.

Schick, J., on Lydgate, , .

Schmidt, A., on Mary Magdalen, .

Sciences, among Anglo Saxons, , under Angevin kings, ff.; , ff.

Scogan, .

Scot, Duns, .

Scotland, poets of, , ff.

Scott, Sir Walter, .

"Scriptoria," .

Scroby, Allan, .

Scrope, Sir R., .

Scyld, .

Seafarer, .

Secret des Secrets, .

Secretum Secretorum, .

Secunda Pastorum, ff.

Sejanus, .

Selred, King, .

Seneca, .

Sentier batu, .

Sergeant, L., on Wyclif, , .

Sergeant, Chaucer's, , .

Sermons, A.S., ff., French, ff., Latin, , with "exempla," , English, ff., in Chaucer, , , in Langland, , by Wyclif, 434.

Serpent of Division, .

Severus, Emperor, .

Sévigné, Madame de, .

Shakespeare, , , , , , ff., , , , , , ff., ff., , , , , .

Shareshull, William de, .

Shepherds, play of, , , ff.

Sheridan, .

Shipman, Chaucer's, , .

Shoreham, William de, , .

Shows, ff.

Sidney, Sir Philip, , , , .

Sidonius Apollinaris, .

Siège d'Orléans, a drama, .

Sienna, mediæval, .

Sievers, E., on Cædmon, .

Sigfried, .

Simon, bishop of Ely, .

Simpson, W. S., on St. Paul's, .

Siriz, Dame, ff.

Skeat, W. W., , , on Langland, , on Testament of Love, .

Skelton, , .

Skirni, .

Smith, Lucy Toulmin, on Mysteries, ; .

Socrates, , .

Soderhjelm, on Horn, .

Solomon, King, , .

Somme des Vices et des Vertus, , , .

Songs, "Goliardois," ; English, ff., , at Christmas, ff.; .

Sophocles, .

Sorel, Albert, .

Southwark, , , , .

Speaker, the, , , .

Spectator, .

Speculum Charitatis, .

Speculum Meditantis, .

Speculum Stultorum, ff.

Speeches, in Parliament, , , ff.

Spencer, H., see Despencer.

Spenser, Edmund, .

Spont, on Chaucer, .

Squire, Chaucer's, , .

Squyr of Lowe Degre, .

Stacions of Rome, .

Stafford, earl of, .

Stage, the, Bk. iii. c. vi., ff.

Stamford-bridge, .

State, Roman idea of, ff., Wyclif on the rights of, ff., ff.

States General, in France, .

Statius, , , , .

Stephen, King, , , .

Sterne, .

Stilicho, .

Stoker, Whitley, .

Stonehenge, .

Stow, J., .

Strasbourg, Gotfrit of, ff.

Stratford-at-Bow, French of, .

Strode, Ralph, , , .

Stuarts, , , , .

Stubbes, Philip, .

Stury, Sir Richard, , .

Sudbury, Simon, , .

Sudre, on Renart, .

Suffolk, Duke of, , .

Sully, Maurice de, .

Summoners or Somnours, , Chaucer's, .

Swalwe, John, .

Swedes, in Beowulf, .

Sweet, H., , .

Swevenyng, Book of, .

Swift, , , , .

Swinburne, , ff.

Swithin, St., .

Swynford, Thomas, .

Tabard inn, ff., , , .

Taborites, .

Tacitus, , , , ff., , ff., , , , .

Taillefer, at Hastings, .

Taine, II., , and Preface.

Talbot, J., earl of Shrewsbury, .

Tale, tales, moralised, , French, ff., Latin, ff., English, , of the Basyn, , of Beryn, , and short stories, ff., of Gamelyn, , of Melibeus, , , , , by Gower, , told by histrions, , by Dunbar, .

Tapestries, .

Tartufe, .

Temple of Glas, ff.

Ten Brink, , on Chaucer, .

Tennyson, , , , , ff., and Preface.

Terence, .

Teseide, , .

Tesoroni, on Ceadwalla, .

Testament of Cresseid, .

Testament of Love, , .

Teutonic races, ff.

Thaon, Philippe de, .

Thebes, Story of, , ff.

Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, .

Theodebert, .

Theodore of Tarsus, .

Theodoric the Great, , , .

Theseus, duke of Athens, .

Thierri, king of Austrasia, .

Thomas, author of Horn, in French, .

Thomas, author of a Tristan, .

Thompson, Maunde, , , , .

Thopas, Sir, , , , .

Thor, , .

Thornton, Gilbert of, .

Thornton Romances, .

Thorpe, W., .

Thre Lawes, a comedy by John Bale, .

Thrissil and the Rois, .

Thrush and Nightingale, , .

Thurkill, .

Thurot, on the Paris University, ff.

Thynne, F., .

Tiberius, .

Til Ulespiegel, .

Tilbury, Gervase of, .

Titus, , .

Torcello, mosaic at, .

Tort, Lambert le, .

Tour Landry, Kt. de la, , .

Tournaments, , , .

Towneley Mysteries, ff.

Toynbee, on Mandeville, .

Trade, English, ff., ff., ff.

Travels, by Englishmen, ff., in France, Bohemia, Italy, ff., of Mandeville, , ff.

Treasures in Scandinavian literature, , in A.S. literature, ff.

Trees, not to be cut, .

Trevisa, John of, , , , , .

Triall of Treasure, .

Tristan and Iseult, ff., , , , .

Trivet, Nicholas, , .

Trogus Pompeius, .

Troilus (and Cressida), , ff., ff., , , , , , , , , , , .

Trojans, ancestors of European nations, ff.

Trojan War, .

Trokelowe, John de, .

Troy Book, ff.

Troyes, Chrestien de, .

Tudors, , .

Turnament of Totenham, .

Tundal, .

Tunstall, Sir Marmaduke, .

Turks, besiege Constantinople, .

Turpin, archbishop, .

Tybert, the cat, ff., , .

Uccello, Paolo, .

Ulysses, .

"Unam Sanctam," bull, .

University of Paris, ff., of Oxford and Cambridge, ff., ff.

Uplandis Mous, .

Urban VI., .

Usener, on Boece, .

Usnech, .

Utopia, .

Vacarius, .

Valenciennes Passion, .

Valerius (alias Map), .

Valkyrias, , , .

Vandals, , , .

Vandois, .

Venus, described by Chaucer, , by Gower, , , by James I., , see Complaint.

Vercingetorix, .

Vespasian, .

"Vice," in Moralities, ff.

Vices et Vertus, see Somme.

Vieil Testament, Mystère du, ff.

Vigfusson, G., .

Vigny, Alfred de, .

Vikings, , .

Villon, , , , .

Vinesauf, Geoffrey de, ff., .

Virgil, , , , , , , , , , , , .

Virgin Mary, , , ff., , , see Joseph.

Visconti, Barnabo, , .

Visions, of St. Paul, Tundal, Thurkill, St. Patrick, , of Rolle of Hampole, , concerning Piers Plowman, ff.

Vital, Orderic, , , , , .

Vitry, Jacques de, , , .

Vocabulary, ff., after the Conquest, ff., of Chaucer, , , of Langland, , in the XVth century, .

Voiture, .

Volsungs, .

Voltaire, .

Volucraire, .

Vox and Wolf, .

Vox Clamantis, ff.

Wace, on Hastings, 99, ; , , , , , ff., .

Wadington, William of, , , , on drama, ff.

Waldhere, , , .

Wales, partly conquered by William, , , described by Gerald de Barry, ; see Welsh.

Walhalla, , , .

Wall, of Hadrian, .

Wallace, William, .

Walsingham, Thomas, , , , ff., ff., on Wyclif, , , .

Walter, archdeacon of Oxford, .

Walter the Englishman, .

Walter, Hubert, .

Waltheof, .

Walworth, Sir William, .

Warner, G. F., on Mandeville, .

Wanderer, .

Wandering Jew, .

War-songs, Germanic, , A.S., ff., .

Ward, H. L. D., on Beowulf, , on Map, .

Warwick, see Guy.

Washbourn, Richard, .

Waterford, Geoffrey de, , .

Waurin Jean de, .

Weber, H. W., on Romances, .

Wedmore, peace of, .

"Wednesday," .

Weeping Bitch, , , ff., .

Weland, .

Welsh language, , laws, , literature, , , legends on Arthur, , traditions, .

Wendover, Roger de, ff.

Werferth, bishop of Worcester, , .

Wesley, , .

Westminster Abbey, .

Wey, William, .

Whitsuntide plays, .

Whittington, Richard, .

Widsith, .

Wife of Bath, , , , , , , , .

Wife's Complaint, .

Wilfrith, St., , .

William the Conqueror, ff., , , , , , .

William Rufus, , .

William of Palerne, ,

Willibrord, St., .

Winchester, Godfrey of, .

Windisch, .

Winfrith (St. Boniface), .

Wireker, Nigel, ff.

Woden, , , ff., , , .

Woman, in Celtic literature, ff., in Scandinavian literature, , in A.S. sermons, , in Chanson de Roland, ff., in chansons, ff., satirised by Map, , in English songs, ff., in Chaucer, ff., ff., in Boccaccio, , , in Gawayne, , excluded from the Pui Society, , satirised, , , in Langland, .

Women, see Legend.

Woodkirk Mysteries, ff.

Worcester, Florence of, .

Wordsworth, .

Workmen, London, in Chaucer, , singing, , St. Joseph one of them, ff.

Wren, Christopher, .

Wright, Aldis, on Robert of Gloucester, .

Wright's Chaste Wife, .

Wulfstan, the homilist, .

Wulfstan, the traveller, .

Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester, , .

Wülcker, on Cædmon, .

Wyclif, , , , life and works, ff., ff.

Wyclif Society, .

Wykeham, William of, , , ff.

Wyntoun, Andrew de, .

Year Books, , ff.

Ymagynatyf, .

York plays, ff., their end, .

Ypres, John of, .

Ysengrin, ff.

Zeno, Apostolo, .

Zimmer, .

Zupitza, on Beowulf, , on Guy of Warwick, .