And again, from the same Passus (he dividing thus his poem into steps or paces) I cite this selfdrawn picture of Envy :

Betwene manye and manye

I make debate ofte,

That bothe lif and lyme

Is lost thorugh my speche.

And when I mete hym in market

That I moost hate,

I hailse hym hendely [politely]

As I his frend were;

For he is doughtier than I,

I dar do noon oother:

Ac, hadde I maistrie and myght,

God woot my wille!

And whanne I come to the kirk

And sholde kneel to the roode,

And preye for the peple

Awey fro the auter thanne

Turne I myne eighen

And bi-holde Eleyne

Hath a newe cote;

I wisshe thanne it were myn,

And al the web after.

For who so hath moore than I

That angreth me soore,

And thus I lyve love-lees,

Like a luther [mad] dogge ;

That al my body bolneth [swelleth]
For bitter of my galle. · -vers. 2667.

It is a savage picture; and as savagely true as was ever drawn of Envy. Those who cultivated the elegancies of letters, and delighted in the pretty rhyming-balance of Romance verse, would hardly have relished him; but the average thinker and worker would and did. It is specially noteworthy that the existing MSS. of this poem, of which there are very many, are without expensive ornamentation by illuminated initial letters, or otherwise, indicating that its circulation was among those who did not buy a book for its luxuries of "make-up," but for its pith. A new popularity came to the book after printing was begun, and made it known to those who sympathized with its protesting spirit;—most of all when the monasteries went down and readers saw how this old grumbler had prophesied truly

in saying "the Abbot of Abingdon and all his people should get a knock from a king"-as they did; and a hard one it was.

so tall he

Langlande was born in the West, and had wandered over the beautiful Malvern hills of Worcestershire in his day but he went afterward to live in London, which he knew from top to bottom; had a wife there, "Kytte," and a daughter, "Calote; shaved his head like a priest; was tall came to be called "Long Will." He showed little respect for fine dresses, though he saw them all; he was in London when Chaucer was there and when the greater poet was writing, and had higher-placed friends than himself; but he never met him, — from anything that appears; never met Wyclif either, with whom he must have had very much thinking

* In saying this I follow literal statement of the poem (Pass. xviii., 12,948), as do TYRWHIT, PRICE, and Rev. Mr. SKEAT, whose opinions overweigh the objections of Mr. WRIGHT, (Introduction, p. ix., note 3, to WRIGHT'S Piers Plowman.) The Christian name William seems determined by a find of SIR FREDERIC MADDEN on the fly-leaf of a MS. in the library of Trinity College, Dublin.

Piers Plowman's Creed, often printed with the Vision, is now by best critics counted the work of another hand,

in common, and who also must have been in London many a time when tall Will Langlande sidled along Fenchurch Street, or Cornhill. Yet he is worthy to be named with him as representing a popular seam in that great drift of independent and critical thought, which was to ripen into the Reformation.

John Wyclif.

In the year when gunpowder was first burned in battle, and when Rienzi was trying to poise himself with a good balance on the rocking shoulders of the Roman people, John Wyclif, the great English reformer and the first translator of the Bible, was just turned of twenty and poring over his books, not improbably in that Baliol College, Oxford- of which in the ripeness of his age he was to become Master. We know little of his early personal history, save that he came from a beautiful Yorkshire valley in the North of England, where the Tees, forming the border line of the County of Durham, sweeps past the little parish of Wyclif, and where a manorhouse of the same name traditionally the birth

river bank. Its grounds stretch away to those 'Rokeby" woods, whose murmurs and shadows relieve the dullest of the poems of Scott.

But there is no record of him thereabout: if indeed he were born upon that lift of the Tees bank, the proprietors thereof who through many generations were stanch Romanists - would have shown

no honor to the arch-heretic; and it is noteworthy that within a chapel attached to the Wyclif manorhouse, mass was said and the Pope reverenced, down to a very recent time. John Wyclif, in the great crowd of his writings, whether English or Latin, told no story of himself or of his young days. We have only clear sight of him when he has reached full manhood when he has come to the mastership of Baliol Hall, and to eloquent advocacy of the rights and dignities of England, as against the Papal demand for tribute. On this service he goes up to London, and is heard there maybe in Parliament; certainly is heard with such approval that he is, only a few years thereafter-sent with a commission, to treat with ambassadors from the Pope, at the old city of Bruges.