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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

it were stores of old Greek MSS.—the poetry, plays, histories, and philosophies of the old Greek world. When the Turks became masters of Constantinople, and a little later of Greece, many of the learned Greeks left their country and passed over into Italy, taking with them the treasures of their ancient literature and art. Here they taught Greek to the Italians, and later to other European nations, while the invention of printing occurring about the same time, many copies were made of the Greek MSS., and thus the Greek literature was soon introduced into nearly every country of Europe.

This opening of the treasures of Greek literature to the people of the fifteenth century was like the discovery of a new world. The bold but trained thinking of the Greeks, their beautiful bright fancies, their skill in art, and their greater trust in nature, were all new to the world of the Middle Ages. The philosophy of Plato, more especially, had the deepest attraction for all the nobler and more earnest minds of that time, because it taught so fully the superiority of the soul over the body and of the life of thought and aspiration over that material indulgence into which society had sunk, and which was fostered by the corruptions in the Church. Plato held the idea that the soul before it entered this world had lived in a world where it had known God, the perfection of goodness and wisdom, and had there been surrounded by a perfect state of society, and by the perfection of outward forms of beauty. He thought all persons had a recollection, more or less clear, of all these perfect types, and that it is from this recollection that we derive those idea of wisdom, goodness, social perfection, and beauty which rise above what we see, or attain to, in this world. The great object of education and of self-improvement, Plato thought, was to preserve and recover these recollections, which were in danger of becoming dimmed or lost by too much contact

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