Conscience, whom they must love as their lord, and rather die than disobey him. They must then follow the brook till they come to the ford "Honour your Fathers," and, passing on, would reach "Swear not at all," and the field "Covet not." Near by they would see two stocks, "Steal not" and "Slay not ; but they must leave these and begin to mount the hill "Bear no false witness," pressing on through a forest of florins, not one of which must they touch; then they would reach the Castle of Truth. The moat around it is Mercy, the battlements are of Christendom. It has a roof, not of lead, but of love and loyalty, and a bridge across the moat called "Pray-well-and-thebetter-speed." The gate is kept by the porter Grace and his man Amend-all.

When the people hear that the road to Truth is by the way of God's commands, they are not so anxious to seek it, but begin, like the men in the parable, to make excuses, and one goes away to see how he likes a piece of ground he has bought, another to drive his new yoke of oxen, a third has a wife who would not like to part with him for a while. Then Piers the Plowman tries if any will work I faithfully at a half-acre he has to plough and sow by the wayside. There are some who will not even do their daily work well for God's sake, they are wasters and idlers who take their ease, but say they will pray for Piers and his ploughing, that God of His grace will multiply the grain and reward his toil. "Your prayers would help, I hope, if ye were true," said Piers. Many, however, helped Piers at his ploughing, and the knight said, "that though he could not plough he would fight for Piers and the faithful workers and defend them." Then Hunger came and punished the idlers and the wasters, and the poet shows how these sins had helped to bring about the terrible misery of that time. But for the faithful toilers at the work God has given them to do, there comes a pardon from

Truth.

This is quite unlike the pardons sold from the Pope, which gave permission to sin again and again; indeed, a friar, who hears it read, says it is no pardon at all, for it only promises eternal life to those that do well.

The next part of the poem describes the search for Dowel, Dobet, Dobest. By Dowel is meant the just and faithful fulfilment of our duty to God and to man. Dobet is all this and more: it represents the overflowing of love into generous, self-forgetful service. Dobest includes the other two, and rises into the teacher and light of men. In the search for these three they are found united in Piers Plowman, who stands for the highest revelation of God in Jesus Christ. In the early life of Christ when He obeyed His parents and worked as a carpenter, He was Dowel. In His latter years on earth, when He went about doing good, loving and caring for the sinful and the suffering, He was Dobet; and when He died for man and gave light and life to the world by the Holy Spirit, He was Dobest.

The search for Dowel, Dobet, Dobest, thus becomes the search for Christ, as the best hope for the world, suffering under the evils and miseries of ignorance and sin; and thus we find the three thoughtful men, Gower, Wyclif, and Langland, reach in different ways the same point in their search for the best help for the evils of the time.

CHAPTER V.

LITERATURE OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

WITH the fourteenth century, Chaucer, Wyclif, Gower, and Langland pass away from their work in this world; and we now enter on a period which, at first sight, seems almost a gap in the story of our English Literature; for during the whole of the fifteenth century, no great English writer, like these four, rises to wake the people to a new "love of Truth and Right," or to show them "nobler modes of life." But we must not imagine, however, because our English literature does not burst into any great and splendid blossom, that the life of thought and feeling was dead among the English people. The four great writers of the fourteenth century rested from their labours, but their work went on, and while the kings and nobles were busy fighting the wars of the Roses, the wise, good, and beautiful words of Chaucer, Wyclif, Gower, and Langland were taking root and springing up in many honest hearts.

We find proof of this in the growing concern of the people to find out for themselves the Truth, as God had revealed it; and tracts and poems were written following in the line of Wyclif and Langland, attacking the errors and evils in the Church. The followers of Wyclif formed a body of men called Lollards; and early in the reign of Henry IV. the Statute of Heretics was passed, which condemned to death by burning all writers or teachers who should teach anything different from the creed of the Romish Church. The Lollard persecution, and

the strong influence which the teaching of the Lollards had over the people, called forth one of the best prose works of this century. This was written by Reginald Pecock, Bishop, first of St. Asaph, and afterwards of Chichester. He called his book "The Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy." In this book, instead of denying the right of the people to read and think for themselves in religious matters, he set to work to reason with the Lollards; and asserted, that argument, and not persecution, was the true way of meeting error; and that, although the clergy had a power and a right to condemn, they should rather patiently and humbly strive to bring back by conviction those who had left the teaching of the Church. Pecock soon found that his book raised enemies against him on every side; he had written it in plain, simple English that all might read it; but the Lollards would not receive his defence of the Church, and the Church would not accept the idea of reasoning with heretics. Pecock was

pronounced by the Church to be a "sickly sheep;" his book was condemned to be burnt, and he himself to be shut up in one room for the rest of his life in the Abbey of Thorney. He was never to have pen or ink again, nor any books but prayer-books and a Bible.

Thus Wyclif and Langland's work lived on, and so also did Chaucer's. Poetry did not die among the English people because there was no great poet. Lydgate wrote poetry, as well as he could, after Chaucer's fashion; and Occleve, a young friend of Chaucer's, followed in the same line. Poetry does not only live in great poems; the daily common life, even of the poorest, is often full of the sweetest poetry; and there are a great number of persons who can clearly see this, and note it down, though they could not plan an epic, nor carry on any long sustained poetic work. And so during this fifteenth century many short poems sprang up like the hedgerow flowers, no one

knowing where they came from, and no one claiming them for his own. These poems were called "ballads." They were stories of some circumstance of life which had a touch of common feeling in it, such as the sense of justice and of liberty in the Robin Hood ballads; the constancy of love in the "Nutbrown Maid;" or the stir of war-spirit in "Chevy Chase." Persons, perhaps, who did not call themselves poets, felt the poetry that lies at the heart of such stories, and turned them into simple verse. The people at once caught the feeling, and learned and sang the ballads in their homes and over their work. It is thought that most of the best ballad-writers were fine-hearted ladies, living in castles and halls, who thus took up the stories of the people and turned them into verse; and there are many touches in them which seem to show a woman's hand.

There were no doubt persons living in the fifteenth century who, when they looked back to the fourteenth and thought of its great writers, said, "The glory of English literature is over." At no period can we truly say this, for the future must always be greater than the past, though we do not always understand what those things are which are making it so; but God knows, and He orders and guides all those forces which move the thought and feeling of the world, and they work as much by His laws as do the forces of nature in the material world. Thus we shall now find that many things were at work at this very time which caused our English literature of the next century to excel in glory that of the past.

The principal of these were the introduction of Greek literature into Europe, the invention of printing, and the discovery of many new countries and races of men in the

west.

In 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks. This city had long been the capital of the Greek Empire, and in