The true spirit of this imaginative work is more comprehensible than any settled design. That mysterious or mythical personage, "Piers Ploughman," is the representative of "the Universal Church," says Dr. Whitaker; or "Christian life," says Mr. Campbell. What he may be is very doubtful, for we have "True Religion," a fair lady, who puts in surely a higher claim to represent "the Universal Church," or "Christian life," than "the Ploughman," who has to till his half-acre and save his idling companions from "waste" and "wane." The most important personage is "Mede," or bribery, who seems to exert an extraordinary influence over the Bench, and the Bar, and the Church, and through every profession which occurred to the poet.
The pearls in these waters lie not on the surface. The visionist had deeper thoughts and more concealed feelings than these rhapsodical phantoms. In a general survey of society, he contemplates on the court and the clergy, glancing through all the diversified ranks of the laity, not sparing the people themselves, as their awful reprover. It was a voice from the wilderness in the language of the people. The children of want and oppression had found their solitary advocate. The prelacy, dissolved in the luxuriousness of papal pomp, and a barbarous aristocracy, with their rapacious dependents, were mindless of the morals or the happiness of those human herds, whose heads were counted, but whose hearts they could never call their own.
We are curious to learn, in this disordered state of the Commonwealth, the political opinions entertained by this sage. They are as mysterious as Piers Ploughman himself.
Passive obedience to the higher powers is inculcated apparently rather for its prudence than its duty. This we infer from his lively parable of "the Cat of a Court," and "A Route of Ratones and Small Mice." "Grimalkin, though sometimes apt to play the tyrant when appetite was sharp, would often come laughing and leaping among them. A rat, a whisker of renown, cunningly proposed to adorn the cat with an ornament, like those which great lords use who wear chains and collars about their necks; it should be a tinkling bell, which, if cats would fancy the fashion, would warn us of their approach. We might then in security be all lords ourselves, and not be in this misery of creeping under benches. But not a raton of the whole rout, for the realm of France, or to win all England, would bind the bell round the imperial neck. A mouseling, who did not much like rats, concluded that if they should even kill the cat, then there would come another to crunch us and our kind; for men will not have their meal nibbled by us mice, nor their nights disturbed by the clattering of roystering rats. Better for us to let the cat alone! My old father said a kitten was worse. The cat never hurt me; when he is in good-humour, I like him well,--and by my counsel cat nor kitten shall be grieved. I will suffer and say nothing. The beast who now chastiseth many, may be amended by misfortune. Are the rats to be our governors? I tell ye, we would not rule ourselves!" The poet adds, "What this means, ye men who love mirth interpret for me, for I dare not!"