to make a good ffare. Than lay the lordis alee that knewe not the kynde cours and warned him wisely Thanne the maste in the myddis, bowid ffor brestynge, and brougte hem to lond; ffor ne had thei striked a strake, and sterid hem the better, and abated a bonet, or the blast come, they had be throwe overe the borde, The volume of Political Poems and Songs from which the above lines are taken contains an irregularly alliterative poem, in eight-lined stanzas, called the Complaint of the Ploughman. This was formerly ascribed to Chaucer, and exists in no earlier form than in printed editions of the fifteenth century, although it probably belongs, as originally written, to the reign of Richard II. It is a satire on the abuses of Church and State, but is worthy neither of the name it claims nor of the author to whom it has been attributed. I am not acquainted with any poem resembling Piers Ploughman in poetic form, of later date than the fourteenth century, which is worthy of notice, though there were several attempts at imitation of this rhythm and metre in subsequent ages. I have already adverted to the remarkable circumstance, that, though many political songs and satires of the preceding century, of a popular cast, were in English, a large proportion of the most important poems of this class in the reign of Edward III. were in French or in Latin. This may probably be explained by the fact, that many of them relate to events or measures of policy, the connection of which with the material well-being of the commonalty was not very obvious, and which therefore did not much excite the interest of the English-speaking people, but appealed rather to the passions, the opinions, the principles of the governing classes, who were generally, no doubt, better instructed in written French and Latin than in the native tongue. These classes, indeed, at the period we are now treating of, certainly spoke English habitually, but they had not cultivated it as a governmental or official organ of communication, and it was therefore essentially unfit for the discussion of political subjects. Such topics found much better vehicles in Latin and in French, which latter tongue, as we have seen, had gradually been trained up to a power of expression that had enabled it to compete with Latin as a learned and universal speech. Froissart, in describing his presentation of a volume of his poems to Richard II., observes, as a noteworthy circumstance, that the King 'loked in it and reed yt in many places, for he coulde speke and rede French very well;' and in the same paragraph he mentions Henry Castyde, an English squire, as an 'honest man and a wyse, and coud well speke Frenche.'* But the same chronicler informs us that the negotiations for the peace of 1393 were conducted in French, and that the English commissioners were much embarrassed by their want of a knowledge of the niceties and subtleties of that language. *Than the kynge desyred to se my booke that I had brought for hym; so he sawe it in his chambre, for I had layde it there redy on his bedde. Whanne the kynge opened it, it pleased hym well, for it was fayre enlumyned and written, and couered with crymson veluet, with ten botons of syluer and gylte, and roses of golde in the myddes, wyth two great clapses gylte, rychely wroughte. Than the kyng demaunded me whereof it treated, and I shewed hym how it treated maters of loue; wherof the kynge was gladde and loked in it, and reed yt in many places, for he coulde speke and rede French very well; and he tooke yt to a knyght of hys chambre, named Syr Richarde Creadon, to beare it into hys secrete chambre.'Lord Berners's Froissart, chap. excviii. Reprint of 1812, vol. II., chap. ccii. p. 619. 'The englysshemen,' says he, had moche payne to here and to vnderstande the frenchemen, who were full of subtyle wordes, and cloked perswacions and double of vnderstandynge, the whiche the frenchemen wolde tourne as they lyst to their profyte and aduauntage, whiche englysshemen vse nat in their langage, for their speche and entent is playne; and also the englisshmen were enfourmed that the Frenchemen had nat alwayes vpholden the artycles, promyses and condycyons, ratyfied in the artycles of peace; yet the frenchmen wolde ever fynde one poynte or other in their writynges, by some subtyle cloked worde, affermynge that the englysshemen had broken the peace, and nat they; wherfore whan the englysshemen sawe or herde in the frenchemens writynges any darke or cloked worde, they made it to be examyned by such as were profoundly lerned in the lawe, and if they founde it amysse, they caused it to be canselled and amended, to the entent they wolde leaue nothynge in trouble; and the englysshmen, to excuse themselfe, wolde say, that frenchemen lernynge such subtylties in their youth muste nedes be more subtyle than they.'* The poems which we have now been considering, and others of minor importance, though of kindred spirit, contributed their share to the extension of the English vocabulary, to the flexibility of the syntax, and to the various culture of the English people, and thus prepared the speech and the nation for the reception of the controversial writings and the scriptural versions of the Wycliffite school, the influence of which on the language and literature of England will be examined in the next lecture. NOTE ON THE ITALIAN DIALECTS. It is difficult for Englishmen and Anglo-Americans, who habitually speak much as they write, and write much as they speak, to conceive of the co-existence of two dialects in a people, one almost uniformly employed in conversation, the other almost as exclusively in writing. Yet such was the state of things in England, from the Conquest at least to the middle of the fourteenth century, and such is the case in a large part of Europe at this day. In Italy, for instance, there is almost everywhere a popular speech, commonly employed by all classes * Lord Berners's Froissart, chap. cxcv., reprint of 1812, vol. ii. pp. 599, 600. See note on Italian dialects at the end of this lecture. in familiar oral intercourse, and so far cultivated that it can be, though it rarely is, written, while, at the same time, the lingua comune d'Italia, or, as it is often called, the Tuscan dialect, is known to all, as the language of books, of journals, and of correspondence, and is also employed as the medium of religious and scholastic instruction. But this literary tongue, at least in those parts of Italy where dialects widely different from it are habitually spoken, always remains to the Italians themselves essentially a foreign language. This fact Biondelli states in stronger terms than a prudent stranger would venture to do upon the testimony of his own observation. Tanto è vero che, per parlare e scrivere italianamente, dobbiamo imparare questa nostra lingua con lunghi e laboriosi studj, poco meno che se apprendessimo la latina o la francese; e a malgrado dell' affinità sua coi nostri dialetti e del continuo leggere, scrivere e parlare l'italiano, ben pochi giungono a trattarlo come conviensi, e grandi e frequenti sono le difficultà che incontriamo ogniqualvolta vogliamo esporre con chiarezza e proprietà le nostre idee, poichè veramente dobbiamo tradurre il nostro dialetto in altra lingua, vale a dire, rappresentare sotto diversa forma i nostri pensieri.'-Biondelli, Saggio sui Dialetti Gallo-Italici, x. There is a similar discrepancy between the written and spoken language in many parts of Germany, though the diffusion of literary culture in that country has made the dialect of books more universally familiar than in most European nations. The traveller Seetzen, whose journals have lately been published, sometimes makes entries in them in the Platt-Deutsch of his native province, and states expressly that he uses that dialect in order that those passages may not be understood by strangers into whose hands his papers might chance to fall. 339 LECTURE VIII. WYCLIFFE AND HIS SCHOOL. WE come now to a period when far other necessities than those of imaginative literature, of mechanical or decorative art, or of any interest of material life, demanded the formation of a new special nomenclature-a nomenclature and a phraseology, which, though first employed in a limited range of themes and discussions, yet, from the intimate relation of those themes to all the higher aspirations of humanity, gradually acquired more extended significance and more varied applications, and finally became, in great part, incorporated into the general speech as a new enlivening and informing element. I refer to the theological vocabulary of Wycliffe and his disciples, which, in a considerable proportion indeed, was composed of words already familiar to the clergy and the better instructed laity, but which those reformers popularized, and at the same time enlarged and modified, by new terms coined or borrowed for use in their translations of the Scriptures, and by imposing on already known words new, or at least special acceptations. The Anglo-Saxons possessed a vernacular translation of the Gospels, and of some other parts of the Bible; and several more or less complete versions of the Scriptures existed in French as early as the twelfth century. But there is no reason to believe that any considerable portion of the Bible, except the Psalter, had ever been rendered into English, until the translation of the whole volume was undertaken, at the suggestion of Wycliffe, and in part by his own efforts, a little before the |