MORLEY'S ENGLISH WRITERS.* MR. MonLEY seems to gain strength as

he advances in his history of English literature, and the present volume is more finished and workmanlike than the first. Altogether we are inclined to rate its merits very highly. The biographies of Chaucer and Gower (to quote two instances) have been disentangled to a great extent from the antiquarian disquisitions with which they had hitherto been overlaid, perhaps unavoidably, by writers who had to con- struct history out of a few legal entries. Mr. Morley gives the pith Of what Tyrwhitt and Sir Harris Nicholas have proved, and adds some results of his own which are always suggestive and sometimes valuable. The analysis of the poet's principal works is well written and thorough, and the passages quoted in those stories we have compared are decidedly those which best deserve quotation. The previous sources from which our early writers drew have been carefully explored, and the differences of the new version noted. The criticism is always judicious, though it is rather from the nine- teenth century outwards, and wants that sympathetic insightinto the life of past times and the thought of great writers which can only be achieved by men who would be poets if they were not critics. There are one or two chapters which are below the general level of the book. The first, though not bad in itself as a summary of Italian literature, seems to us to fail of its main purpose—the establishing a close connection between Italian and English literature. Of Dante's influence we can distinguish no trace, unless it be in a single passage parodied by Chaucer ; Petrarch's sonnets have no parallel in his own or the next century in England ; and though Boccaccio served to a certain extent as a model, he could hardly have done so if he had not drawn from the French fabliaux which were the mother-source of Italian and English novel literature. The account given of the monastic chroniclers is weak in another way. It is written without special knowledge of the historians enumerated, and is mostly made up of dates and titles of books. Several important writers, such as Wikes, Hemingburgh, and Adam of Marimuth are omitted altogether. Perhaps it would have been better to leave the subject untouched, as it scarcely requires a place in Mr. Morley's scheme, but if done at all it should have been done thoroughly. Nevertheless, when all defects have been summed up, Mr. M.orley's book is the best account we know of our early English literature, and is likely, we think, to take rank as a standard authority. Like most works on which genuine labour has been expended, its blemishes of execution are such as will not impair its usefulness, and may easily be corrected.

Among those antiquarian additions which we have indicated as suggestive, if not valuable, is a curious theory that John Gower the poet was a clergyman in his old age from 62 to 69, and married on the very verge of seventy, obtaining a formal licence and resign- ing his living. The proofs, which are certainly ingenious, consist• chiefly of these; that a John Gower received a grant from Edward HI., in 1365, of 10/. rental, for himself and heirs, from the manor of Wigborough, in Essex ; that a John Gower was Rector of the adjoining parish of Great Braxted from 1390 to March, 1397; and that John Gower, probably the poet, was married by a licence of January 25th, 1397, in a chapel of his own, in the priory of St. Mary Overies. We confess we hesitate to accept this theory. That a man past 60 would be ordained is more than a little improbable ; but that, being in orders, he would be allowed to marry, and by the bishop of another diocese, the licence specifying that there must be no canonical impediment, is so unlikely as to be all but impossible. Mr. Morley will find in the inquisitions after death that there was a John Gower, who appears in 1364 acting for the prior and convent of Wormesley, in Hereford (a county with

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Moneys English Wrilers, from Chaucer to .Dunbar. Vol. N. ram I. London: Chapman end Hall. which the poet had no connection), and who was seemingly

a dependent of the Chandos family. Here is one man at least as likely to have been Rector of Great Braxted as the poet, and certainly more likely to have been in orders. But, in fact, there were three families of Gowers in Wales, Yorkshire, and Suffolk, whom we can speak to with some certainty, and though the Suffolk branch is the most likely to have furnished Essex with a rector, it is not certain that the poet was the only John Gower of his own family. The late Professor Shirley all but established that there were two John 1Vycliffes, each a clergy- man, each of Oxford, both living at the same time, and whose Jives and actions had been blended into one. Genealogists have shown that a single Count Alan in our ancient Baronages has usurped the personalities of three different companions of the Con- queror. Until further publications of our State documents have made it possible to give the history of every family connected with land in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, nothing can be more unsafe than to argue absolutely from a few entries. Yet it would have been a curious result, if Gower, like Lope de Vega or Calderon, had been proved to have been in close connection with the Church during the latter years of his life, and Mr. Morley's 'labour will not have been thrown away if it stimulates further research into his real history.

Gower and Chaucer are in a certain sense representative men of two currents of thought that are never absent from a healthy society. They write in the same century, and each is so far influenced by the fashion of his age as to string stories together in which love is a prominent theme. But Gower is a born politician.

Before he has finished thirty lines of his Confessio Amantis he is discussing the state of the world,—

In sundry wise so diversed That it well nigh stant all reversed,

and declares that the object of his book is to hold up good princes and bad to the mirror of history. His Vox Clamantis, as its very title indicates, is the voice of one crying out against the social disorders that found expression in the revolts of the serfs under Richard II. A third work, the Tripartite Chronicle, is in fact a supplement to the second, describing the human work of Richard's minority, the hellish work of the coup d'itat he effected, and the

work in Christ that was wrought by those who overthrew his tyranny. Writing in old age and sickness, latterly like Milton in blindness, Gower lacked Chaucer's fine eye for the colouring of earth and flowers, and his quick ear for the song of Spring birds, 'but he kindled with a divine indignation of which Chaucer is incapable against the vices by which

The comun people is overlain,

And bath the Kinge's sin abought, Although the people agulte nought.

Chaucer is an artist reflecting with almost colourless precision whatever the world around him has to show. We cannot agree with what seems to us a foregone conclusion of Mr. Morley's that he exhibits "the simple sturdiness of the dutiful, God-seeking Anglo-Saxon," or that he worked to the same end as Wycliffe, Lang- lande, and Gower. As a gentleman of the times when the House of Commons petitioned Henry IV. to confiscate all the Church

revenues, as a dependent and connection of John of Gaunt, he was no doubt rather a Wycliffite than a High Churchman ; and as an artist he hai a keen sense of the gold-seeking and grosser vices of the clergy. But his ideal of the model priest is a quiet man,

who follows Christ's lore, but does not quarrel with sinners, who goes in. the world's procession with the wife of Bath and the Summoner, and whose most vigorous morality is a mild remonstrance Against a volley of oaths. To Chaucer, a story, however foul, is fit material, if it be humorous. Mr. Morley's apology for the Sum- moner's tale, one of low, gross humour, that the times permitted in- decorum, but that "the spirit was that of a Christian gentleman,'

because it attacks the hypocrisy of the Friars, can surely not be extended to the Miller's tale, which required to be excused even to Chaucer's generation. To Gower, on the other hand, "moral Gower," as Chaucer most aptly calls him, nothing was unclean that conveyed a moral. The story of Canace, though its language is as pure as the subject allows, is directed against excessive anger in cases of human frailty, and scarcely pauses by the way to condemn an incestuous love. There are touches of profound pathos in the moralist, which the artist with all his cunning cannot match.

The deep pity for the lost woman which inspired Gower in the simple lines,

And in my berme there lieth to wepe Thy child° and min, which sobbeth fast,

Is withotit parallel in the Canterbury Tales. Yet, as Mr. Morley

has well pointed out, whenever Chaucer differs from his foreign au- thorities it is on the side of manliness and purity. The Italian Emilia, quick to understand a love sigh, apt to trick herself out for a possible suitor, singing "beautiful verses always about love," is transformed by the English poet into a simple girl gathering flowers, unconscious of passion, and singing "heavenly as an angel." The fall of Cressida is extenuated and ex- plained till we think of her as rather weak than base. The fact is, that England and France or Italy were as different moral latitudes in the fourteenth as in the seventeenth centuries, and a little later to "love in the English fashion" is used as a mocking pro-

verb for a pure attachment in the Heptameron. In justice to Boc- caccio, it may be noted that even he has struggled out of the lowest depths ; compare him with Apuleius, and a nameless element of impurity diappeturs from the Roman story in its Italian dress. Thus much character had been added to art and thought by a few cen- turies of Christianity, but until within the last century, when the few great Italian writers have been pure, while English poetry has comparatively deteriorated, there has probably always been a slight advantage in favour of our national morality. At the same time, Dante and the lyric poets who preceded him, and Michael Angelo and Tasso in later times, perhaps, testify to a higher sea:- timent in Italy co-existent, as often happens, with a lower practice.

An interesting chapter on "Miracle Plays and Mysteries" will introduce many to a new department of English literature. Mr. Morley appears to doubt the tradition that leave had to be obtained from the Pope before these could be acted in the vulgar tongue. But as the Church was the common theatre, it is not very wonderful that its rulers should claim the right to interfere and control. Nor was the jealousy with which they regarded the change unnatural. As long as Latin was the language of the stage, the mystery preserved a certain decency and solemnity, and was rather a splendid function of the Church than a popular show. But when the use of English was introduced, the taste of a vulgar audience had to b3 conciliated by homely scenes and broad or irreverent jokes. Gradually the play acted came to have no connection with religion, and the anger of Bishop Latimer had some excuse when he found a congregation gone off to see Robin Hood acted in a neighbouring church. Again, it must be remem- bered that the Puritan party in the thirteenth century, headed by men like Grosseteste, were opposed to any secular use of the Church, whether for legal pleas or for the Feast of Fools, and for- bade laymen to look on at any acting. Mr. Morley's specimens are well chosen, and will probably give the idea that the Pope would have done better to withhold his consent to the last. That "the whole teaching of these plays was devoutly earnest" can only be said in the sense that they were often paraphrases of Scripture. But they ring the changes of the very worst superstitions that had taken root in our popular mythology, the belief in a world given up to devils, and a society reformed by the fear of judgment and of hell. They approach the Incarnation from its coarsest aspects, and fritter away the simple narrative of the Descent into Hell in a feeble bombast. Gradually they depart more and more from the Gospel narrative, and base themselves on the childish legends of the Apocryphal Gospels. They belong to an age of decadence, and reflect its moral rottenness more thoroughly than more elaborate works might have done. It is well to know them as they were, that we may understand in what products a century of suppressed thought culminated, but if the English Reformation wanted any apologY, it might find it in the dramatic literature of the Church of the fifteenth century. Mr. Morley will do well to clear the second edition of a really valuable book from all irrelevant pro- fessions of faith in an Anglo-Saxondom that he tries to paint as earnest, vigorous, and pure, and whose works were a rotten church, civil war, and a tainted literature.