quarian interest, and not, like Chaucer's, for the pleasure they give us. In his day he was much read, for then books were few. His principal work is the "Confessio Amantis" -Confession of a Lover-which he wrote at the request of King Richard II., grandson and successor of Edward III. The king and the poet met one another in their boats on the Thames (then used as the great highway or thoroughfare of London), and Richard invited his friend into the royal barge for a little talk. "Book some new thing," said he, "into which book I myself may often look." The result was a poem of some 30,000 lines, written in English ; Gower's previous writings having been mainly in French or Latin. Gower lived to a great age, and passed the last eight years of his life in total blindness. He had a strong personal friendship for Chaucer, who in his turn calls him "the moral Gower"- a name which has ever since clung to him.

Gower's French work, a religious poem which probably gave rise to this epithet, is lost. His principal Latin work, "Vox Clamantis," is a satire on the vices and follies of the age, wherein the king is not spared, a circumstance which, by a side-light, throws credit on Richard for continuing his friendship with the poet.

John de Trevisa, a Cornish clergyman, translated Ralph Higden's "Polychronicon." In this translation he tells us that he avoids the "old and ancient English," so that the people of his time can understand it; and in another hundred years, when Caxton prints this translation, we read that he finds it necessary to re-write the "rude and old English; that is, certain words which in these days be neither used nor understood." So times change, and language changes with them.

Although the list is closed of Chaucer's English contemporaries, there remains the name of a Scottish writer, who died some years before him. John Barbour (1320-94) was the author of a long poem called "The Bruce," describing

the deeds of that hero, who lived about half a century before he wrote. Barbour held an office in the church and was a man of scholarly education; he was also a zealous patriot, and did full justice to the character and exploits of Robert Bruce, while his own soul was on fire with the thought of Scottish liberty and independence. He writes from the heart:

Ah, Freedom is a noble thing;

Freedom makes man to have liking;
Freedom all solace to man gives;
He lives at ease who freely lives.

CHAPTER VI.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER.

HAUCER was unquestionably the greatest writer of his time. Unlike the others, he had no espe

cial lesson to teach or particular view to inculcate. He wrote purely for pleasure and because he could not help it; all his wisdom, fun, pathos, sweet poetic tenderness, love of nature, and clever insight into human character had to come out in words. The feeling that he was making something to live that never lived before, gives the joyous tone running through his work, and produces the effect of bubbling over. He was the first great English story-teller; and when we remember with what eagerness works of fiction are read even in our advanced age, we can not wonder that the people of the fourteenth century, living in the childhood of the new civilization and having little besides the frivolous French fabliaux or the inventions of Geoffrey of Monmouth to satisfy their intellectual hunger, should have seized upon the food offered to their imaginations in the picturesque tales of Chaucer. This would account for his popularity in his own and the following century, but he