free the philosopher's pen again; and there came of this freedom the Opus Majus by which he is most worthily known. Subsequently he was permitted to return to his old sphere of study in Oxford, where he pursued afresh his scientific investigations, but coupled with them such outspoken denunciations of the vices and ignorance of his brother Friars, as to provoke new condemnation and an imprisonment that lasted for fourteen years - paying thus, in this accredited medieval way, for his freedom of speech.

It is not improbable that we owe to him and to his optical studies-in some humble degree - the eye-glasses that make reading possible to old eyes: and his books, first of any books from English sources, described how sulphur and charcoal and saltpetre properly combined will make thunder and lightning (sic facies tonitrum et coruscationem). We call the mixture gunpowder. In his Opus Majus (he wrote only in Latin, and vastly more than has appeared in printed form) scholars find some of the seeds of the riper knowledges which came into the Novum Organum of another and later Bacon --with whom we must not confound this sharp,

eager, determined, inquiring Franciscan friar. He is worthy to be kept in mind as the Englishman who above all others living in that turbid thirteenth century, saw through the husks of things to their very core.

He died at the close of the century - probably in the year 1294; and I have gone back to that far-away time somewhat out of our forward track-and have given you a glimpse of this Franciscan innovator and wrestler with authorities, in order that I might mate him with two other radical thinkers whose period of activity belonged to the latter half of the succeeding century: I mean Langlande and Wyclif. And before we go on to speak of these two, we will set up a few waymarks, so that we may not lose our historic bearings in the drift of the intervening years.

Bacon died, as we have said, in 1294. William Wallace fought his great battle of Cambuskenneth in 1297. Those who have read that old favorite of school-boys, Miss Porter's "Scottish Chiefs," will not need to have their memories refreshed about William Wallace. Indeed, that hero will be apt to loom too giant-like in their thought, and with a halo

about him which I suspect sober history would hardly justify. Wallace was executed at Smithfield (Miss Porter says he died of grief before the axe fell) in 1305; and that stout, flax-haired King Edward I., who had humbled Scotland at Falkirk who was personally a match for the doughtiest of his knights who was pious (as the times went), and had set up beautiful memorial crosses to his good Queen Eleanor-who had revived King Arthur's Round Table at Kenilworth, died only two years after he had cruelly planted the head of Wallace on London Bridge. Then came the weak Edward II., and the victories of Bruce of Bannockburn, and that weary Piers Gaveston story, and the shocking death of the King in Berkeley Castle. The visitor to Berkeley (it is in Gloucestershire, and only two miles away from station on the Midland Railway) can still see the room where the murder was done : and this Castle of Berkeley-strangely enough — has been kept in repair, and inhabited continuously from the twelfth century until now; its moat, its keep, and its warders walks are all intact.

After this Edward II. came the great Edward III. known to us through Froissart and the Black

Prince and Crecy and Poitiers, and by Windsor

Castle

which he built and by Chaucer and Wy

clif and Langlande and Gower, who grew up while he was king; known to us also in a worse way, for outliving all his good qualities, and becoming in his last days a peevish and tempestuous voluptuary.

Some few foreign way-marks I also give, that the reader may have more distinctly in mind this great historic epoch. Dante died in exile at Ravenna, six years before Edward III. came to power. Boccaccio was then a boy of fourteen, and Petrarch nine years his elder. And on the year that Crecy was fought and won - through the prowess of the Black Prince, and when the Last of the Tribunes, as you see him in Bulwer Lytton's novel, was feeling his way to lordship in Rome, there was living somewhere in Shropshire, a country-born, boy poet-not yet ripened into utterance, but looking out with keen eyes and soreness of heart upon the sufferings of

*The story of the Black Prince meets with revival in our day, by the recent publication of "Le Prince Noir, Poeme du Herault d'Armes Chandos," edited, translated, etc., by FRANCISQUE MICHEL, F.A.S. Fotheringham: London, 1884. The original MS. is understood to be preserved in the Library of Worcester College, Oxford.

poor country folk, and upon the wantonness of the monks, and the extravagance of the rich, and the hatefulness of the proud all which was set forth at a later day in the Vision of Piers Plowman.

William Langlande.

This was William Langlande* (or Langley, as others call him), reputed author of the poem I have named. It makes a little book-earliest, I think, of all books written in English - which you will be apt to find in a well-appointed private library of our day. I won't say that it is bought to read, so much as to stand upon the shelves (so many books are) as a good and sufficient type of old respectabilities. Yet, for all this, it is reasonably readable; with crabbed alliterative rhythm ;- some Latin intermixed, as if the writer had been a priest (as some

*Precise dates are wanting with respect to Langlande. Facts respecting his personal history are derived from what leaks out in his poem, and from interpolated notes (in a foreign hand) upon certain MS. copies. Of three different texts (published by the E. E. Text Soc.) Mr. SKEAT dates one about 1362 - a second in or about 1377, and the third still later. The first imprint has date of 1550.