The chief merit of 'Piers Plowman' lies in its being a democratic document, an exact expression, in a homely guise, of the popular sentiment. It gives voice, in the language of the people, to the indignation roused by the corruption it exposes in the nobility, in the Government, and in the Church. Unfortunately, it was necessary for the author to veil his attacks under an allegory, and to resort to the personification of vices and virtues to avoid personalities. To make a long-drawn allegory at all palatable is one of the most difficult of undertakings, and one of the most rarely successful. It says much for Langland's genius that he succeeded in this almost impossible task. For 'Piers Plowman' is still readable, and it is so because the author has known how to relieve the tedium of his allegory by diversions, by sarcastic and ironical wit, by the vigour of his descriptions, and by his minute and vivid drawing of domestic scenes. Langland knew low life as well as Skelton or Crabbe, and he painted it with all the skill of a Dutch master.

But neither this attention to detail nor his allegorical method obscures the earnestness which inspired the humble country priest, who, like Wycliffe, saw in the abuse of wealth by the rich. and in the possession of wealth by the Church and Mendicant Friars the root of all the evils he deplored. 'It is in his intense, absorbing moral feeling,' Dean Milman has well observed, that he is beyond his age with him outward observances are but hollow shows, mockeries, hypocrisies without the inward power of religion. It is not so much in his keen cutting satire on all matters of the Church, as his solemn installation of Reason and Conscience as the guides of the self-directed soul, that he is break

1 History of Latin Christianity,' quoted by Dr. Skeat, to whose admirable edition of Langland I am much indebted.

ing the yoke of sacerdotal domination; in his constant appeal to the plainest, simplest Scriptural truths, as in themselves the whole of religion, he is a stern reformer. The sad, serious satirist, in his contemplation of the world around him, the wealth of the world and the woe, sees no hope but in a new order of things in which, if the hierarchy shall subsist, it shall subsist in a form, with powers, in a spirit totally opposite to that which now rules mankind. The mysterious Piers the Plowman seems to designate from what quarter that Reformer is to arise.'

After Chaucer and Langland a long interval elapses before we come across any English satirist of worth. Lydgate's satirical work is too insignificant to give us pause, and John Gower, to whom Chaucer and Lydgate apply the epithet of 'moral,' is a moralist indeed in whom there is no humour. He has no individuality and no power of creation. Thomas Occleve has a distinct humour of his own, but his verses have hardly any claim to be considered literature. For fifty years after the death of Lydgate (? 1440), England, torn as she was by civil wars, produced neither satirist nor poet. But during this period the lamp of literature was kept burning across the Border. A group of Scottish writers, with James I. of Scotland at their head, kept alive the tradition of Chaucer. Of this group, Henryson, Dunbar and Lyndesay concern us, and chiefly Dunbar. All three were afflicted with the prevailing disease of allegory. Robert Henryson in his 'Moral Fables' adapted the Æsopian 'Fables' to the manners of the day in order to show

'How many men in operation

Are lyke to bestis in condition,'

and is so singularly successful that he may even bear comparison with La Fontaine. For he has the gift

of easy narration and the power of satiric comment to a remarkable degree. But in spite of his wit and humour and he has both-he is over-prone to moralize and too ready to preach.

William Dunbar, the foremost and most versatile poet of this Scottish school, has two manners of satire. He can be mild or vindictive, subtle or violent in his attacks. At one time he uses the allegorical style to lash with a wild and burlesque humour personified vices, at another he deluges with furious outbursts of abuse his personal enemies at the Court of King James. In The Dance of the Deadly Sins' he has come near to equalling Langland in those passages of Piers Plowman' which suggested it. In his railing mood he is a Scottish Skelton, and displays in his satirical ballads just that quality of extremely coarse wit which in later times distinguished Burns. No great amount of originality either in matter or in manner can be justly claimed for Dunbar. But in his verse, as in that of Henryson, there is a music which is seldom to be found in that of Skelton or Barclay, their English contemporaries. Sir David Lyndesay, however, though a daring and trenchant satirist, is so unpolished and uncouth that he can hardly rank as a poet at all. His life was one of action. His writings are those of a man who is, above all things, an earnest reformer, a would-be corrector of all abuses. He was sincere in his convictions and courageous in expressing them. The volume of his work is large. 'The Complaint of Papingo' is perhaps his best political satire. The allegorical method of this piece does not blunt its edge. His full-blooded humour and trenchant invective against corrupt priests and vicious Court favourites are best exemplified in his Satyre of the Threi Estates'—a Morality or Interlude acted before the Court and

having the additional interest of being the first approach to regular dramatic composition in Scotland. But Lyndesay wrote so much during a life busied with the stormy politics of the time that his work is in execution far below the level of his predecessors. His aim is practical, but he has no mastery over his machinery. Moreover, the very sincerity which inspired him to write at all leads him too readily, for a satirist, into political moralizing and somewhat prosy preaching.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century we can return once more to England, and there, in the comic and satirical part of the 'pithy, pleasaunt and profitable works of John Skelton,' we recognise a writer truly original in his own special line. In him, however, we need look for no refinement of style, and little trace of Chaucer's influence. Gifted with a rude but caustic humour and considerable force of imagination, he added to these qualities a profound knowledge of life both high and low. Even apart from the fascinating originality of his matter and manner, his almost exhaustless vocabulary of popular English renders him well worth reading.

Laureate of both Universities and perhaps Court Poet1 to Henry VIII., Skelton became Rector of Diss about 1500, and continued to pour forth invectives in the metre which is called after his name.2 The verses rattle on one rhyme till they can no more. The chimes ring in the ear and the thoughts are flung about like coruscations." There is in these

3 6

1 Certainly he was tutor to Prince Henry.

'Yt cometh the wele me to remorde

That creaunser [tutor] was to thy sofreyne lord,'

he says in a poem against lusty Garnyshe.

2 Skeltonics.

3 Cf. the metre of Ingoldsby Legends. 4 1. D'Israeli.

quick-returning rhymes a stirring spirit which is heightened by the playfulness of the diction. His new words are not 'new words with little or no wit," but pungent, ludicrous and expressive. He used slang knowingly, in the manner of a scholar. His chief satirical productions are 'The Bowge of Courte,' 'The Boke of Colyn Cloute,' and Why Come Ye Nat To Courte.' In the first of these he gives us a gallery of characters painted with a boldness and discrimination unknown since the days of Chaucer, and displayed by none of his contemporaries, save, perhaps, the brilliant Dunbar.2

Here, however, there is little of the sincere native ring, none of the virulence and bitterness of the personal note which we find in 'Why Come Ye Nat To Courte.'

Colyn Cloute is a savage satirical philippic against the corruptions of the Church. Skelton attacks the bishops for their laziness, luxury, and ignorance, and does not spare the lower orders of the clergy. Like Langland, he based his attack on popular feeling. When he pronounces of this piece:

'For though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,

Rudely rayne beaten,

Rusty and moughte eaten,

If ye take well therwith

It hath in it some pith' (ll. 53-58),

he is not over-rating its vigour and fearlessness. Yet good criticism of his own work was hardly to be expected from an author who wrote a poem of 1,600 lines in honour of himself. None the less is he right with regard to the merits of Colyn Cloute. In all these satires, indeed, there is a moral earnestness underlying intemperate and scurrilous 2 Dyce, Skelton's Works, 1843 3The Garlande of Laurell.'

1 Hudibras.