CHAPTER IV.
In our last chapter we went back to the latter edge of the thirteenth century and to the City of Oxford, that we might find in that time and place a Franciscan Friar—known as Roger Bacon, who had an independence of spirit which brought him into difficulties, and a searchingness of mind which made people count him a magician. I spoke of Langlande and Wyclif: and of how the reforming spirit of the first expressed itself in the alliterative rhythm of the Piers Plowman allegory; and how the latter declared against Papal tyranny and the accepted dogmas of the Church: he too, set on foot those companies of “pore priests,” who in long russet gowns reaching to their heels, and with staff in hand, traversed the highways and byways of England, preaching humility and charity; he gave to us moreover that Scriptural quaintness of language, which from Wyclif’s time, down to ours, has left its trail in every English pulpit, and colored every English prayer.
Then we came to that great poet Chaucer, who wrote so much and so well, as—first and most of all contemporary or preceding writers—to make one proud of the new English tongue. He died in 1400, and was buried at Westminster—not a stone’s throw away from the site of his last London home. His tomb, under its Gothic screen, may be found in the Poet’s Corner of the Abbey, a little to the right, on entering from the Old Palace Yard; and over it, in a window that looks toward the Houses of Parliament, has been set—in these latter years, in unfading array—the gay company of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims.
In the same year in which the poet died, died also that handsome and unfortunate Richard the Second[53] (son of the Black Prince) who promised bravely; who seemed almost an heroic figure when in his young days, he confronted Wat Tyler so coolly; but he made promises he could not or would not keep—slipped into the enthralment of royalties against which Lollard and democratic malcontents bayed in vain: there were court cabals that overset him; Shakespeare has told his story, and in that tragedy—lighted with brilliant passages—John of Gaunt, brother to the Black Prince, appears, old, and gray and near his grave; and his son—the crafty but resolute Henry Bolingbroke—comes on the stage as Henry IV. to take the “brittle glory” of the crown.