Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/259

 of religion for the interpretation of human interests and passions. Italy was naturally ahead of other countries in the dignity and suppleness of her new literature, for Italian and the Italians had been hellenised many centuries ago, and the younger race was inheriting the intellectual property of its ancestors. The literature of the northern nations was of slower growth, and their hellenisation was yet to come.

Before the middle of the fourteenth century there was little or nothing in England which could be called literature—no Greek at all, Latin with a mere savour of latinity, and of English no more than a few rude songs, mainly provincial and political, a few still ruder miracle plays, and a handful of hazardous translations from the Latin or French. It is true that as early as 1327 William of Shoreham had made his English version of the Psalms; and not long afterwards the hermit Rolle of Hampole made another version, followed by a didactic poem, The Pricke of Conscience. But Wyclif was a middle-aged man before Chaucer—indebted, like himself, to the protection and good-will of the Duke of Lancaster translated—The Romaunt of the Rose, and produced, in Anglo-Norman amalgam, The Court of Love.

John Wyclif may or may not have had all these English manuscripts, and others which succeeded them, under his notice, at one time or another in his active intellectual life. That he read some of them, the Psalms, the Pricke of Conscience, the Againbite, the translation of the Manuel des Péché's,