his friend's good stories. It is difficult to know precisely when Gower's "Confessio Amantis" was first written. In its earliest form, as set forth in the Harleian MS., 3490, Gower saidwithout then naming as a date "the yere sixtenthe of King Richard"—that he wrote it at the request of Richard the Second. He had met the King's barge when rowing on the Thames, and Richard, having invited him on board, asked "That to his highé worthynesse Some newé thing I shuldé boke, Gower adds that although he had long been out of health, he did his best for the king "To make a boke after his heste, Professor John W. Hales has reasoned that the work could only have been thus undertaken, and completed-as it is in that first form-with a loyal dedication to Richard II., at a time when Gower had yet hope in the young King. Such hope was possible only before the year 1386. In 1386 the great barons of England were active under the lead of the King's uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, whom Gower in the Latin verse of a "Tripartite Chronicle" has honoured as the Swan. Richard was then compelled to establish a Regency for twelve months. Professor Hales, looking for a date before 1386, finds several allusions that suggest to him the end of 1383 and the year 1384 as the time when the poem may have been first written. Afterwards in "the yere sixtenthe of King Richard," homage to the King was struck out of the beginning and end of the poem. Bolingbroke --Henry of Lancaster-was addressed in his place, and Gower, like Langland, had turned his back upon an evil King whose deposition was the best hope of the country. The sixteenth year of King Richard, in which Gower changed the dedication of his poem, was the year 1393. In 1393-4 Henry of Lancaster presented a collar to Gower, possibly in recognition of the dedication thus transferred to him. Gower is represented on his tomb as wearing the collar of SS with a small Swan chained; but Henry of Lancaster did not assume the Swan as his badge until after the murder of Gloucester in 1397. The collar of SS must, therefore, have been a later gift. In 1397, the year of Gloucester's murder, for which Richard was responsible, Gower resigned his Essex rectory, and resigned the world. Being then about seventy years old, he married Agnes Groundolf in a chapel of his own, under rooms to which he retired with her for the rest of his life within the Priory of St. Mary Overies, now known as St. Saviour's, on the Southwark side of London Bridge. The old Priory was then being for the second time rebuilt, and Gower contributed so liberally to the building works that upon his death in 1408, after eleven years of residence among them-during eight of the years blind-the brethren built for him a handsome tomb, on which they carved his figure in effigy. They represented him with his head resting on the three books he had written, in French, Latin, and English. They also paid him pious honour on a painted window which another kind of piety has since destroyed. The tomb remains. The effigy upon it helps us to recall him in his habit as he lived. But in this volume his mind lives again for friendly and familiar speech among all classes of his countrymen. In the "Confessio Amantis" Gower, of course, so chose his connecting matter that he might bring his tales into distinct groups, with each group armed for battle against one of the Seven Deadly Sins. He added one book more, based on a work popular in the Middle Ages, the "Secretum Secretorum," ascribed to Aristotle. It set forth the Duties of a King, and Gower inserted it because he was writing the poem for King Richard the Second, who was in much need of such instruction. Gower contrived also to mix with his stories much knowledge. upon matters of philosophy and science. Indeed if we add all the record of what Aristotle taught Alexander to the other good doctrine of the Confessor, we have the substance of a fair education for any modern reader who does not mind being five B hundred years behind the day. The book will have for many readers an interest, apart from its tales, in its pleasant record of the kind of knowledge that a well-trained man thought worth diffusing in the latter half of the fourteenth century. The reader to whom old English is new English will after experience of a few pages slip into Gower's music, and find his lines easier reading than some even of the good verse published in our time. In reading aloud these differences between old and new English should be remembered: (1) The old pronunciation of the vowels was nearer than it now is to the practice abroad, as its survival in our country dialects will help to show. (2) Words added to our vocabulary from the Norman French were nearer to their source, and usually had their accents near the close, as they are placed in Frenoh. (3) As a general rule a vowel at the end of a word was sounded if the next word began with a consonant, and had no separate sound if the next word began with a vowel. (4) Verbs in 'eth,' like 'cometh,' were pronounced often, but not necessarily, without regarding the 'eth' as more of a syllable than the 'es' in comes. (5) Where 'th' or 'v' came between two short syllables, as in whether, other, ever, there was usually an elision. In the text here given whether' was generally written where' (whe'er); in other such words the reader makes the contraction for himself. The metre tells him when to do so. It (6) The conjunction 'and' was not necessarily placed at the beginning of a clause connected by it with preceding matter. may stand within the clause as the word 'also' does in modern English. Some of Gower's commonest forms, like 'sigh' for saw, will become quickly familiar. Because an equivocal word like 'not' for 'ne wot-know not-might cause a stumble now and then, I have interpreted that and other such words rather often in the footnotes, the purpose of those notes being to interrupt the text as little as possible, while enabling the eye to take in at once the meaning of an obsolete word or form. Where the same word often recurs, the explanation is repeated often but not always often enough, it is hoped, for the convenience of a reader who dips into the book for a tale or two, and has not yet read it through. The only modernised word is the pronoun 'thee' in a few earlier pages of the volume. It had in Gower's time, like 'me,' only one 'e.' This of course gives readers the trouble of discriminating between pronoun and article. Wher- ever in the early pages of the book the word 'thee' is found, the second 'e' is of my adding; but after those earlier pages I have avoided making even that slight alteration. A few notes on the sources of Gower's Tales will be found in the Table of Contents. Of John Gower himself and of his works CARISBROOKE, March 1889. H. M. |