with long trailing gowns, on whose tails the devil will ride gayly. 1327-1377 Robert of Brunne wrote in the opening of the fourteenth century, a century which witnessed the final triumph of English, and saw it made from thenceforth the rightful speech of England. It was in the reign of Edward III. that this triumph came, although a century earlier, Henry III., when he came to be king, had issued a proclamation to the English in their own language. indeed high time for English kings to adopt the language of the land they lived in, for Normandy was no longer a possession of England; it had been lost to the Crown by King John Lackland, and had become altogether an alien land. It was, therefore, good policy as well as good sense for the kings of England to restore the neglected speech of their country. But it was not until the language of France was the speech of their enemies that the English king and people united to crush it in England. When the stout yeomen among whom King Edward III. and his brave son, the Black Prince, fought at Cressy and Poitiers, had beaten France in two great battles, both king and people willed that the language of their foes should never more be the language of England, and a royal decree declared that the speech of the land should be henceforth English. 1346 But before this, stronger powers than a king's edict had been at work in literature. It was a fortunate day for language and for poetry when GEOFFREY CHAUCER was born. He and a group of noble contemporaries had more power to make the English language current than all the decrees of a long line of kings. To them, and to the people, who heard them gladly, we owe the great revival of the original speech of our forefathers. X. TELLING OF SOME OF THE MEN WHO WROTE IN CHAUCER'S TIME; AND OF THE VISION OF PIERS PLOUGHMAN. I THINK we have now an idea of the way in which literature began in England, and of its struggles to be heard in the language native to the people, from the coming of the English to the islands of Britain, down to the reign of Edward III. In this reign appeared a group 1327 to 1377 of writers who firmly established the language in literature. These men were GEOFFREY CHAUCER, JOHN WYCLIFFE, JOHN GOWER, and WILLIAM LANGLAND. From the time of these authors, written English took on such form that you can read it to-day with little difficulty. Before their time you would find even Robert of Brunne, who said he wrote no strange English, rather hard to understand. You have seen that since the coming of the first Christian priests to England, literature owes its life to the Church and to the labors of the Churchmen, who, from the Venerable Beda onward, had devoted themselves to the spread of learning and literature. There seem to have been pure and pious men in these early days of the Church, who, sincerely religious, devoted themselves to good works. But during the years that followed the establishment of the religion of Rome in England the Christian Church was gradually growing corrupt. What taint there was in it of corruption and hypocrisy had spread through the whole body, and at the time we have now reached, many of the religious teachers of the people had become so bad that the good men among the priests, and the more intelligent part |