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middle of the twelfth century, and can be traced far onward in the next. The boldness of invective would be incredible, especially since churchmen were almost always the writers; were we not to remember the peculiar position of the church in England, and also several special circumstances in the history of the time. The most lively and biting of our satires of this class are connected by a whimsical thread. The hero is an imaginary priest called Golias, who is at once a personification of the worthless ecclesiastics, and the mouthpiece of the body in their remonstrances to their rulers; while he is occasionally made a bishop, when his elevation helps to give point to a sarcasm directed against the dignified clergy. From the humorously and coarsely candid "Confession of Golias" are extracted the verses which have so often been quoted as a drinking-song, and attributed to d. aft. Walter Map or Mapes.* For this and other reasons, it is 1196. believed that the character of the hero may have been invented, and that in all likelihood many of the poems were written, by Mapes; a man of knowledge as well as wit and fancy, who might have been named as the author of a cunious miscellany in Latin prose, and will come in our way immediately as a writer in another field. He was a favourite of Henry the Second, and promoted by him to the archdeaconry of Oxford, and to other benefices.

With the reign of John begins a new series of Latin pasquinades, levelled at the political questions of the day, and all embracing the popular side. The king and his successor are lashed unsparingly; the persons praised are De Montfort, and the other barons who opposed the crown. The Latin, however, although the appropriate organ of circulation among the clergy, was not so for any other audience. It continued to be used, but less and less; the Norman-French became more frequent, a fact which seemingly indicates a design of the writers to obtain a hearing among the nobles and their retainers; and, towards the end of our period, the English dialect of the day was almost the only medium of this satirical minstrelsy. About the close of the century, the ballad-makers employed themselves in fanning that patriotic hatred of Frenchmen, which the wars of Edward the First made it desirable for the descendants of the Normans to foster; and the Scots, for similar reasons, were libelled with equal goodwill. One piece, a bitter complaint of oppression of the poor by the nobles and higher churchmen, purports to have been written by an outlaw in the greenwood, and thrown on the highway to be picked up by passengers.

*Meum est propositum in taberna mori.

8. The dignity of the Roman tongue was hardly infringed further by the jests of Golias and his confederates, than it was by another use to which it was frequently put in the times under review, and by which the later poetry of Europe profited largely.

It became the means of preserving and transmitting an immense stock of Tales, which otherwise would inevitably have been lost, and which, from those days down to our own, have been the germs of the finest poetical inventions. Such stories found, on various pleas, ready admission into works of a very serious kind: and, in particular, the want of critical judgment with which history was written, gave room for the grave relation of many legends of the wildest character. One of our countrymen, already named, Gervase of Tilbury, in an historical work presented to his patron the Emperor of Germany about the beginning of the thirteenth century, inserted a special section "On the Marvels of the World." It abounds with the strangest fictions, which reappeared again and again for centuries; and one of its superstitious legends suggested to Sir Walter Scott the combat of Marmion with the spectre-knight. Other churchmen employed their leisure in collecting stories avowedly fictitious: and among these was an English Cistertian monk, Odo de Cerinton, who, a little earlier than Gervase, compiled a very curious mass of moral fables and other short narratives.

Many scattered inventions of the sort travelled from the East, in the course of that constant communication with Asia which was maintained in the age of the Crusades: and from that quarter came the earliest of those collections, in which the separate tales were linked together by one consecutive story. This was the Indian romance of Sindabad; which, through the Hebrew and Greek, passed into the Latin, and thence into every living tongue of Europe, appearing both in prose and verse, and being made to assume new names and manners in each of its new shapes. It is commonly known as "The Seven Sages," and underwent its last stage of decay in becoming one of our own common chap-books. In its most usual form, the outline which connects the parts together is this. The son of a Roman emperor is condemned to death by his father, on the instigation of an evil-minded step-mother and, warned by a magician, he remains obstinately silent, though he had it in his power to exculpate himself completely. The seven wise men who were the imperial counsellors endeavour to move their lord to mercy, by telling him tale after tale to prove the danger of rash judgments: the empress strives to destroy the effect of each lesson, by a tale inculcating justice or promptitude: and the prince's life is thus preserved, till, the appointed days of

ilence having elapsed, he makes his defence and exposes the calumny of his accuser. Several of the stories told are repeated in other collections of the sort, as well as in the later poetry of England and the continent.

A celebrity yet greater was attained, and a wider influence exerted on literature, by another series of fictions, not united by any one story, and known by a title for which, various as its matter is, hardly any part of it furnishes a reason. It is called the "Gesta Romanorum," or "Deeds of the Romans." Manufactured into different shapes in different countries, and not having the same contents in any two of them, it is everywhere a medley of the most dissimilar elements. There are fables in the manner of Æsop, and distorted fragments of Grecian learning, from Argus and Mercury to Alexander of Macedon and his tutor Aristotle. In the Roman history we begin with memorials of the Æneid, being told how Pallas the son of Evander was a giant, his skeleton, when disinterred, exceeding in length the height of the walls of Rome; the leap of Curtius into the gulf which yawned in the forum is said to have been performed by Marcus Aurelius; and the poet Virgil assumes the character, which he still retains by tradition in Italy, of a mighty but benevolent enchanter. The outlines of some thrilling tales of terror are furnished by the record of local superstitions, celebrating visitations of supernatural beings and the adventures of treasure-seekers who descend into caverns magically protected. And it is worth while to note that, in one of the most elaborate of these fictions, the original hero was the learned Gerbert, believed to have introduced algebra into Christendom; who, although he became the last pope of the tenth century, paid the old penalty of eminent knowledge by being regarded as a magician. One or two of the tales are monkish legends: some are short chivalrous romances: some are moral and religious apologues or parables. Others, pretty numerous, are familiar pictures of society, almost always satirical in cast, and levelling their wit most frequently at the female sex. In pieces of this last kind, the "Gesta" very often have a close resemblance, in character as well as incident, to those French poems which we shall immediately know by the name of Fabliaux.

It is alike uncertain when, where, and by whom the "Gesta" were first compiled. Probably they arose in Germany; but so many of the stories are taken from older sources, that, even if the collection did not find its way to England till the fourteenth century, there can have been few of them that were not already known.

9. The uses to which those Latin tales were applied in t

middle ages were very various, and several of them not a little amusing. Some of the collectors may have had no further aim, than that of relieving the weariness of a monk's inactive life; and copies were multiplied in the convents, for the benefit of those brothers who were disinclined to weightier studies. It has been believed, also, that, in those readings aloud during meals, which were practised in most of the monastic communities, the light stories often took their turn with books of a more solid kind.

But the collections of fiction were used yet more publicly. They became the manuals of preachers, who had recourse to them for examples and illustrations suitable to the taste of rude and ignorant hearers. Several books of the sort were avowedly designed for being useful in this way and one of these at least was written in England, bearing a title which may be translated, "The Text-book of Preachers." It was compiled in the latter part of the fourteenth century, by John Bromyard, a Dominican friar, himself noted as a pulpit orator, and as a strenuous opponent of Wycliffe.

The "Gesta" themselves, in all their shapes, are carefully adapted for this and other didactic purposes. For there is annexed to every tale a religious application or moral. These practical inferences are often absurdly inapplicable to the narrative, and could not well have been otherwise: often, also, they are dexterously devised for recommending superstitious practices or erroneous doctrines: and the freedom of dealing with sacred things and names makes many of them unfit to be recorded. An idea of the turn they usually take may be gathered from one little narrative, which probably was invented for the sake of the moral. A dying emperor puts into the hands of his son a golden apple, which, travelling through distant lands, he is to present to the greatest fool he can find. After many wanderings, the prince reaches a country whose government is regulated by a strange law: the king is appointed for one year only, at the end of which he is banished, and must die poor and miserable. The traveller asks whether any one has been found to fill the last vacancy: and, learning that the throne is occupied, he offers his apple to the king, as the most foolish man he has ever encountered. The leading doctrine to be inferred is very obvious. The unwise king is the sinful man, who lives for the fleeting enjoyments of this world, content to purchase them by lasting misery in the next. Laymen sometimes outdid the clergy themselves, in the ingenuity with which they moralised the favourite inventions. There is a picturesque story of a nobleman, who, falling into a deep pit, in which are a lion, an ape and a serpent, is rescued by a wood-cut

ter. Instead of rewarding his benefactor, he causes him to be cruelly beaten. The historian Matthew of Paris tells us, that this fable was frequently in the mouth of Richard Coeur-de-Lion; and that he applied it as representing the ingratitude to heaven shown by those princes of Christendom, who refused to assist in wresting the Holy Sepulchre from the infidels.

10. The re-appearances of those monastic fantasies in English poetry have been so frequent and so interesting, that we are tempted to anticipate a little for the purpose of making ourselves acquainted with some of them.

Both in the Latin, and in French translations, they became current in England, as elsewhere, before the close of the thirteenth century. Stories either identical with some of them, or very like, appear early among the Chivalrous Romances; a class of works whose history, both in their original French, and in the English translations and imitations, we shall immediately begin to study. Indeed it is not always certain whether the minstrels have borrowed from the monks, or the monks from the minstrels. Two of the most famous of the romances which still survive in our own language, are in substance the same with stories of the "Gesta." The one is "Guy of Warwick," which, in its simplest shape, is truly a devout legend, breathing a darkly ascetic spirit. The hero deserts his wife and child to do battle in the Holy Land: returning home, he thinks proper, instead of rejoining his family, to hide himself in a hermitage near his castle; and only on his deathbed does he allow himself to be recognised. The other romance is Robert of Sicily, which shrouds a fine moral under a fantastic disguise. The prince being puffed up with pride, an angel is sent to assume his figure and take his place; while he, changed so as not to be known, is insulted and neglected, and becomes thankful to be received as the jester of the court. After long penance has taught him humility, he is restored to dignity and happiness.

When we reach the poetry which adorned England in the latter half of the fourteenth century, we shall have to examine the works of its two chief masters so closely, that their obligations to the Latin books of amusement could not at present be specified without causing a risk of repetition. But we ought here to learn that Chaucer, the greatest of our old poets, owes to the "Gesta" two at least, if not more, of his tales; and that Gower, a man of much weaker invention, borrows from them with yet greater freedom.

The latter of these names, however, introduces us, with seeming abruptness, to the most celebrated name in our literature. The longest piece in the "Gesta" is the romance of " Apollonius," a

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