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PERIOD III.

FROM CHAUCER'S DEATH TO ELIZABETH,

1400-1558.

LESSON 12.

Brief Historical Sketch.-First English statute enacting religious bloodshed was that against the Lollards, followers of Wyclif, 1401. Battle of Agincourt, by which Normandy was reconquered, 1415. The Hundred Years' War ended and France delivered, 1451. Joan of Arc the French leader, 1422-31. Jack Cade's Revolt, 1450. House of Lancaster -Hen. IV., Hen. V., and Hen. VI.-1399-1461. House of York-Ed. IV., Ed. V., and Rich. III.-1461-1485. War of the Roses, in which the castles were battered down, and the nobility almost destroyed, 1452-1485. At its close on Bosworth Field, the Earl of Richmond, a Lancastrian, marries Eliz. of York, and becomes Hen. VII., the first Tudor king. At the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, 1453 (they had settled in Europe, 1356) the learned scholars studying the Greek manuscripts there fled principally to Italy. Disclosure of the stores of Greek literature wrought the Revival of Learning. Caxton set up the first printing-press in England, 1476. Only the gentry ate wheaten bread; poorer people ate bread made of barley or rye, sometimes of peas, beans, or oats. Plaster ceilings not yet used. Chimneys introduced about 1485. Discovery of America by Columbus, 1492. Grocyn and Colet the first to teach Greek in England, at Oxford, 14901500. Hen. VIII. succeeded Hen. VII., 1509. Erasmus professor of Greek at Cambridge, 1511. Hen. VIII. fought the battle of Flodden Field against the Scots, 1513. Magellan circumnavigated the earth, 1519. Hen. VIII. became head of the Eng. Church, 1531. First pavement in London, 1534. Sir Thomas More beheaded for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy to Hen. VIII., 1535. Dissolution of monasteries in England, 1536-9. Rebellion in Ireland crushed, 1535, and in 1541 Hen. VIII. received the title "King of Ireland." During Ed. VI.'s reign, 1547-53, English prayer-book prepared by Cranmer. Under Mary, 1553-8, English Church again acknowledges the pope, and persecution of heresy is resumed.

LESSON 13.

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY PROSE.-"The last poems of Chaucer and Langland bring our story up to the year 1400. The century that followed is the most barren in the literature. History sank down into a few Latin chroniclers, of whom THOMAS WALSINGHAM is best known. Two Riming Chronicles were written in Henry V.'s time by ANDREW OF WYNTOUN, a Scotchman, and JOHN HARDING, an Englishman. JOHN CAPGRAVE wrote in English, in Edward IV.'s reign, a Chronicle of England which began with the Creation. Political prose is then represented by SIR JOHN FORTESCUE'S book on the Difference between Absolute and Limited Monarchy. It is the second important book in the history of English prose. The religious war between the Lollards and the Church went on during the reigns of Henry V. and VI., and, in the reign of the latter, REGINALD PECOCK took it out of Latin into homely English. He fought the Lollards with their own weapons, with sermons preached in English, and with tracts in English; and after 1449, when Bishop of Chichester, he published his work The Repressor of overmuch Blaming of the Clergy. It pleased neither party. The Lollards disliked it, because it defended the customs and doctrines of the Church. Churchmen burnt it, because it agreed with the Bible-men' that the Bible is the only rule of faith. Both abjured it, because it said that doctrines were to be proved from the Bible by reason. Pecock is the first of all the Church theologians who wrote in English, and the book is a fine example of early prose.

GROWTH OF INTEREST IN LITERATURE.-Little creative work was done in this century, and that little was poor. There was small learning in the monasteries, and few books were written. But a good deal of interest in literature was scattered about the country, and it increased as the century went on. The Wars of the Roses stopped the writing, but not the read

ing, of books. We have in the Paston Letters, 1422-1505, the correspondence of a country family from Henry VI. to Henry VII., pleasantly, even correctly, written-passages which refer to translations of the classics, and to manuscripts' being sent to and fro for reading. Henry VI., Edward IV., and some of the great nobles were lovers of books. Men like Duke Humphrey of Gloucester made libraries, and brought over Italian scholars to England to translate Greek works. There were fine scholars in England, like John Lord Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, who had won fame in the schools of Italy. Before 1474, when Caxton finished the first book said to have been printed in England, The Game and Playe of the Chesse, a number of French translations of the Latin authors were widely read. There was, therefore, in England, a general, though an uninformed, interest in the ancient writers.

FIRST INFLUENCE OF THE ITALIAN REVIVAL.--Such an interest was added to by the revival of letters which arose at this time in Italy, and the sixteenth century had not long begun before many Englishmen went to Italy to read and study the old Greek authors on whom the scholars driven from Constantinople, at its capture by the Turks in 1453, were lecturing in the schools of Florence. Printing enabled these men on their return to render the classic books they loved, into English for their own people. The English began to do their own work as translators; and, from the time of Henry VIII. onwards, there is scarcely any literary fury equal to that with which the young scholars fell upon the ancient authors, and filled the land with English versions of them. It is, then, in the slow upgrowth, during this century, of interest in and study of the ancients that we are to see the gathering together at its source of one of the streams which fed that great river of Elizabethan literature, which it is so great a mistake to think burst suddenly up through the earth.

INFLUENCE OF CAXTON'S WORK.-We find another of these sources in the work of our first printer, WILLIAM CAXTON.

He

The first book that bears the inscription, 'Imprynted by me, William Caxton, at Westmynstre,' is The Dictes and Sayings of Philosophers. Caxton did little or nothing for classical learning. His translation of the Eneid of Vergil is from a contemptible French romance. But he preserved for us Chaucer and Lydgate and Gower with zealous care. He printed the Chronicles of Brut and Higden; he translated the Golden Legend: and the Morte d'Arthur, written by SIR THOMAS MALORY in the reign of Edward IV., one of the finest and simplest examples of early prose, was printed by him with all the care of one who loved the noble acts of chivalry.' had a tradesman's interest in publishing the romances, for they were the reading of the day, but he could scarcely have done better for the interests of the coming literature. These books nourished the imagination of England, and supplied poet after poet with fine subjects for work or fine frames for their subjects. He had not a tradesman's, but a loving literary, interest in printing the old English poets; and, in sending them out from his press, Caxton kept up the continuity of English poetry. The poets after him at once began on the models of Chaucer and Gower and Lydgate; and the books themselves, being more widely read, not only made poets but a public that loved poetry. If classic literature, then, was one of the sources in this century of the Elizabethan literature, the recovery of old English poetry was another.

PROSE UNDER HENRY VIII.-With the exception of Caxton's work all the good prose of the fifteenth century was written before the death of Edward IV. The reigns of Richard III. and of Henry VII. produced no prose of any value, but the country awakened from its dulness with the accession of Henry VIII., 1509. A band of new scholars, who had studied in Italy, taught Greek in Oxford, Cambridge, and London. John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's, with John Lily, the grammarian, set on foot a school where the classics were taught in a new and practical way. Erasmus, who had all the enthusiasm

which sets others on fire, taught in England, and with Grocyn, Linacre, Sir Thomas More, and Archbishop Warham formed a centre from which a liberal and wise theology was spread.

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The new learning which had been born in Italy, and which these men represented in England, stirred and gave life to everything, and woke up English Prose from its sleep. Much of the new life of English Literature was due to the patronage of the young king. It was Henry VIII. who supported SIR THOMAS ELYOT, and encouraged him to write books in the vulgar tongue that he might delight his countrymen. It was the king who asked LORD BERNERS to translate Froissart, a book which made a landmark in our tongue,' and who made LELAND, our first English writer on antiquarian subjects, the 'King's Antiquary.' It was the king to whom ROGER ASCHAM dedicated his first work, and the king sent him abroad to pursue his studies. This book, the Toxophilus, or the School of Shooting, 1545, was written for the pleasure of the yeomen and gentlemen of England, in their own tongue. Ascham apologizes for this, and the apology marks the state of English prose. Everything has been done excellently in Greek and Latin, but in the English tongue so meanly that no man can do worse.' He has done his work well, and in quaint but charming English.

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PROSE AND THE REFORMATION.-But the man who did best in English prose was SIR THOMAS MORE in the earliest English history, the History of Edward V. and Richard III. The simplicity of his genius showed itself in the style, and his wit in the picturesque method and the dramatic dialogue that graced the book. English prose grew larger and richer under his pen, and began that stately step which future historians followed. The work is said to have been written in 1513, but it was not printed till 1557. The most famous book More wrote, The Utopia, was not written in English. The most famous controversy he had was with WILLIAM TYNDALE, a man who in his translation of the New Testament, 1525,

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