Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/564

556 and spirit of his onslaughts. One passage, which we quote, had evidently been acted on by Chaucer's "poor parson," and can be studied even at this late day.

Friars and many other masters,

That to lewed men preachen,

Ye moven matters unmeasurable

To tellen of the Trinity,

That oft times the lewed people

Of their belief doubt.

Better it were to many doctors

To leave such teaching,

And tell men of the ten commandments,

And touching the seven sins,

And of the branches that bourgeoneth of them,

And bringeth men to hell,

And how that folk in follies

Misspenden their five wits,

As well friars as other folks,

Foolishly spending,

In housing, in hatering,

And in to high clergy showing

More for pomp than for pure charity.

The people wot the sooth

That I lie not, lo!

For lords ye pleasen,

And reverence the rich

The rather for their silver."

It would be hardly proper to leave this portion of the subject without alluding to the remarkable passage which has been held by many as a prophecy of the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII., nearly two centuries later. After denouncing the corruptions of the clergy, he says:—

But there shall come a king

And confess you religiouses,

And beat you as the Bible telleth

For breaking of your rule;

And amend monials,

Monks and canons,

And put them to their penance.

And then shall the Abbot of Abingdon,

And all his issue forever,

Have a knock of a king,

And incurable the wound."

A distinctive and charming feature of the English landscape is the hedgerow that divides the fields and marks the course of the roadways. Nowhere but in England does the landscape present such a charming picture of "meadows trim with daisies pied," "russet lawns and fallows gray," spread out like a map, divided with irregular lines of green. Nowhere else is the traveller's path guarded on either hand with a rampart of delicate primroses, sweet-breathed violets, golden buttercups fit for fairy revels, honeysuckles in whose bells the bee rings a delighted peal, and luscious-fruited blackberry-bushes. Nowhere else is such a rampart crowned with the sweet-scented hawthorn, robed in snowy blossoms, or beaded over with scarlet berries, and with the hazel, with its gracefully pendent catkins, or nuts dear to the school-boy. It scarcely seems possible to imagine an English landscape without its flower-scented hedge-rows, and yet, when the armed knights of Edward the Third's reign rode abroad from their castles, few lofty hedges barred their progress across the country; no hazel-crowned rampart stopped the way of the Malvern monk as he took his way to the "bourne's side"; and when the ploughman "whistled o'er the furrowed land," the line of division at which he turned his back on his neighbor's acres was generally but a narrow trench instead of a ditch and hedge. Thus the covetous man confesses,

"If I yede to the plow,

I pinched so narrow

That a foot land or a furrow

Fetchen I would

Of my next neighbor,

And nymen of his earth.

And if I reap, overreach."

As might have been expected, the monkish dreamer, unusually liberal as he was in his views, had but a slighting opinion of women. Rarely does he refer to them except to rate them for their extravagance in dress and love of finery. The humbler class of women, he shrewdly insinuates, were fond of drink, and the husbands of such were advised to cudgel them home to their domestic duties. He credited the long-standing slander about woman's inability to keep a secret:—

For that that women wotteth

May not well be concealed."

His opinion of the proper sphere of women in that time, and some knowledge of their ordinary feminine occupations, can be acquired from the