To England's threats Barbour replies by challenges, and by his famous apostrophe to liberty:
A! fredome is a noble thing!...[607]
Some people, continues the good archdeacon, who cannot long keep to the lyric style, have compared marriage to bondage, but they are unexperienced men who know nothing about it; of course marriage is the worst state in which it is possible to live, the thing is beyond discussion; but in bondage one cannot live, one dies.
IV.
A little above the copse another head rises; that of Chaucer's great friend, John Gower. Unlike Chaucer in this, Gower hated and despised common people; when he allows them room in his works, the place assigned to them is an unenviable one. He is aristocratic and conservative by nature, so that he belongs to old England as much as to the new nation, and is the last in date of the recognisable representatives of Angevin Britain. Like the latter, Gower hesitates between several idioms; he is not sure that English is the right one; he is tri-lingual, just as England had been; he writes long poems in Latin and English, and when he addresses himself to "the universality of all men" he uses French. He writes French "of Stratford," it is true; he knows it and confesses it; but nothing shows better how truly he belongs to the England of times gone, the half-French England of former days: he excuses himself and persists. "And if I stumble in my French, forgive me my mistakes; English I am; and beg on this plea to be excused."[608]
Unlike Chaucer, Gower was rich and of good family. His life was a long one; born about 1325, he died in 1408. He was related to Sir Robert Gower; he owned manors in the county of Kent and elsewhere; he was known to the king, and to the royal family, but undertook no public functions. To him as we have seen, and to Strode, Chaucer dedicated his "Troilus":
O moral Gower, this book I directe
To thee and to the philosophical Strode,
To vouchen sauf, ther nede is, to corecte
Of your benignitees and zeles gode.[609]
Gower, in his turn, represents Venus addressing him as follows:
... Grete well Chaucer whan ye mete
As my disciple and my poete,
For in the floures of his youth,
In sundry wise as he well couth,
Of dittees and of songes glade,
The which he for my sake made,
The lond fulfilled is over all.[610]