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Yet we will not forget that in the two great deliverances from the tyranny of nation over nation and from the property of man in man, the chief agent was the Church of Rome. Distinctions of caste were to her peculiarly odious, because incompatible with other distinctions essential to her system. How great a part she had in the abolition of slavery we have elsewhere seen. Tenderly treating her own bondmen (whom she declined to enfranchise), we have seen her regularly adjuring the dying slaveholder, as he asked for the last sacraments, to emancipate his brethren for whom Christ had died. Corrupt as she was, there is reason to believe that had she been overthrown in the fourteenth century, the vacancy would have been occupied by a system more corrupt still. Her leading-strings, which will impede the full-grown man, are necessary to preserve and uphold the infant. She will be allowed a hundred and fifty years more in which to fill the measure of her offences, that she may fall only when time has laid bare the root of her degeneracy, when faith and manners, ideas and morals, may change together and subsist in harmony.

Learning. In an age when every one, rich or poor, lives with his hand on his sword, it is not strange that general education should have been neglected. War and woodcraft were the pride of the great. Not one in five hundred could have stumbled through a psalm. If they read, they spelled the small words, and skipped the large ones. Information passed from mouth to mouth, not from eye to eye. Men were auditors, not readers. The populace had poets for themselves, whose looser carols were the joy of the streets or the fields,-songs that perished on the lips of the singers. Across the gulf of mystery, the opening line of some fugitive rehearsal falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world,

'Sitteth all stille, and harkeneth to me!'

The clergy alone were learned, and they only relatively. The pulpit was the chief means of instruction. In the little village church,-endeared to the peasant by the most touching incidents of his life, or in vast and spired cathedral, amid smoking censers, the blaze of lamps, the tinkling of silver bells, the play of jewelled vessels, and gorgeous dresses of violet, green, and gold,-listened the silent and unquestioning people.

Books-still in manuscripts, copied in the Scriptorium by the

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patient monks were few and costly. They had not always titles to denote their subjects, and are described by their outsides often shining in extreme splendor. Froissart, the French historian, on a last visit to England in 1396, presented to Richard a book beautifully illuminated, engrossed with his own hand, bound in crimson velvet, and embellished with silver bosses, clasps, and golden roses. As much as forty pounds was paid for a copy of the Bible. Shelves were not required. At the beginning of the century, the Oxford library consisted of a few tracts kept in chests. A private collection-scant and phenomenal - consisted for the greater part of the romances of chivalry, so long the favorite literature of the noble, the dame, and the lounger of the baronial castle. Some monasteries had not more than twenty volumes. Latin versions of the Scriptures,-Greek or Hebrew never; a commentator, a father, a schoolman; the mediæval Christian poets who composed in Latin; a romance, an accidental classic, chronicles and legends,—such are the usual contents of a surviving catalogue-a sad contraction of human knowledge.

The glimmerings of the revival of the ancient classics, incipient in the twelfth century, fading in the thirteenth owing to the prevalence of scholasticism, are somewhat more distinct in the fourteenth. Petrarch and Boccaccio were the first to lead the way in disinterring them from the dungeon-darkness where they safely slept, undisturbed by the monks who were ignorant of their treasures or regarded them as the works of idolaters. The light of learning, having first made its entrance into France, now, in natural course of progress, found its way into England,-dimmed by distance from its Italian focus. The debt of England to Italy in the matter of our literature begins with Chaucer, but a hundred years will pass before the imagination of the North is inflamed by the sacred fires kindled at Florence and at Rome.

The common herd of students (through the medium of Latin translations) looked upon Aristotle as their infallible oracle and guide, though stripping him of all those excellences that really belonged to him, and incapable of entering into the true spirit of his writings. Oxford-and Cambridge as well-had received many noble foundations. She was the school of the island, the fount of the new heresies, the link of England to the learned of Europe. To her, during the English wars, was transferred the

intellectual supremacy of Paris. But of the vast multitude once composing its learned mob, there remained in 1367 less than a fifth. The master idea, running to excess, was languishing by expenditure of force.

Language. For the scholastic uses of the learned, and for ecclesiastical purposes, Latin was still a living though a dying tongue. For the last fifty years of the century, French was to all classes of Englishmen a foreign language, and, even as taught, was a mere dialect of the Parisian. Chaucer, in the Testament of Love (attributed) says:

Certes there ben some that speke thyr poysy mater in Frenche, of whyche speche the Frenchemen have as good a fantasye as we have in hearing of French mennes Englyshe.

And adds:

Let, then, clerkes endyten in Latyn, for they have the propertye in science and the knowinge in that facultye, and lette Frenchmen in theyr Frenche also endyte theyr queynt termes, for it is kyndly to theyr mouthes; and let us shewe our fantasyes in suche wordes as we learneden of our dames tonge.'

The Prioress in the Tales, though she speaks French neatly, speaks it only —

'After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,

For Frenche of Paris was to hire unknowe.'

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But the old Teutonic, assuming a new organization, recovered its ascendancy by the same circumstances which depressed its rival. Formal note of its triumph is found in a statute of 1362, which orders English to be used in courts of law, because 'the French tongue is much unknown.' Later it is observed of the grammar schools that 'children leaveth Frensche and construeth and lerneth in Englische.' Chaucer, writing for the instruction of his little son, uses the vernacular, because 'curious enditying and harde sentences are full hevy at once for such a childe to lerne,' and, like a true patriot, bids the boy think of it as the King's English.

The first revolution which English underwent, consisted, as formerly explained, in the conversion of it from an inflectional and synthetic into a non-inflected and analytic speech. Its state in this particular towards the close of the century may be not unfairly represented by the Lord's Prayer:

Our Fadir that art in hevenys;

Halewid be thi name.

Thi kyngdom come to,

Be thi wil done in erthe as in hevene.

Give to us this day oure breed oure othir substaunce.

And forgive to us our dettis as we forgiven to our dettouris:
And lede us not into temptacioun:

But delyvere us from yvel. Amen.'

The second, which it was now undergoing, and which its adoption by the court and nobility made possible, was its intermixture with foreign elements. Translations and travel greatly enriched it by importations from the South. The new power of thinking, and the new words to embody its conceptions, came together, twin-born. The English language thus enlarging its domain by conquest and assimilation, yet retaining its essentially Germanic character, displays the same powers of acquisition as have distinguished the race.

Against this alien admixture the critics protested. 'I seke,' says one, no strange Inglyss, bot lightest (easiest) and communest.' Thus early was our purity imperilled! As if new modes of expression were not the creatures of new modifications of thought. A national idiom is in perpetual movement, resembling, as it struggles into perfect existence, the lion of the bard of Paradise,

pawing to get free His hinder parts.'

What survives? Trevisa, translating a Latin treatise in 1387, tells us he avoids 'the old and ancient English.' In the next century, his printer will rewrite this translation, 'to change the rude and old English; that is, to wit, certain words which in these days be neither used nor understood'! Little did Caxton imagine that he himself would be to us what Trevisa was to him,—an archaism, covered with the rust of time. The cry of of the purist is the pang of parturition. Styles are like shades melting into each other, passing with the generations that cast them. It is with words as with empires. We each in our day see only the beginnings of things.

Poetry. Two notions rule the age: the one tending to a renovation of the heart; the other, to a prodigal satisfaction of the senses; the one disposing to righteousness, the other to excitement; the one planting the ideal amidst forms of force and joy; the other amidst sentiments of truth, law, duty; the one producing finical verses and diverting stories, the other the indig

nant protest against hypocrisy and the impassioned prayer for salvation. For the omnipotent idea of justice will overflow, and conscience, like other things, will have its poem.

In the Vision of Piers the Plowman, by William Langland (1362), the sombre genius of the Saxon reappears, with its tragic pictures and emotions. The author-Long Will,' they call him,—is a secular priest, who once earned a miserable livelihood by singing at the funerals of the rich. Silent, moody, and defiant, his world is the world of the poor. Far from sin and suffering his fancy flies to a May morning on the Malvern Hills, where he falls asleep and has a wonderful dream:

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The canvas of the dreamer is crowded and astir with life, from the king to the bondman. Here are the minstrels, who 'geten. gold with their glee'; jesters and jugglers, Judas' children'; petitioners and beggars, who flatter for hir food' and fight 'at the ale'; pilgrims, who seek the

saintes at Rome,

They wenten forth in hir way

With many wise tales,

And hadden leave to lien

All hir life after;'

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the court-haunting bishop, pardoners, 'parting the silver' with the parish priest; friars,

'All the four orders,

Preaching the people

For profit of hem selve:"

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