Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/405

 or "This writer spoke the same dialect as Langland," but it would be very hazardous to say, on the strength of so many vocables and grammatical forms, "Wyclif himself wrote this, and no other man of northern origin, of Oxford training, and of occasional sojourn in London." The English of the fourteenth century was in a specially plastic and evolutionary phase; the yeast of stimulated thought was constantly changing its form; the same writer presents a varying model at different stages of his life. Chaucer's prose is not identical in point of language with his poems; the Knights Tale may be readily discriminated from his earlier essays in verse; and even in the same poem we find words which are used in two or more forms.

Wyclif doubtless varied in this way, as his contemporaries did; and thus we should be slow to say that a particular piece was either his or not his, on this score alone. But when we add to the testimony of the words that of idiom, manner, turn of expression, and habit of thought, unquestionably there is a better foundation to go upon. There are sundry English works which have been universally attributed to Wyclif, which raise no question in the mind, but rather produce a conviction of authenticity as they are read, and of which the date of writing is fixed between the years 1382 and 1384 by the mention of events then in progress.

Of these, two or three are especially characteristic of Wyclif—The Church and Her Members, the Great Sentence of Curse, and the tract on the Schism of the Roman Pontiffs. In each of them there is a reference