This amusing anecdote is an evidence that this ethical poet, after two centuries and a half, was not forgotten; his spirit was still vital, his volume still lay open on the library table; it afforded a pungent lesson to the courtiers of Charles the First as it had to those of Richard the Second.
GOWER was learned, didactic, and dignified. The manuscripts of his works are usually noble and sumptuous copies; more elegantly written and more richly illuminated than the works of other poets. His commonplaces and his legendary lore seem to have awed the simplicity of the readers of two centuries, whose taste did not yet feel that failure of the poet who narrated a fable from Ovid with the dull prolixity of a matter-of-fact chronicler. His fictions are rarely imaginative; yet critics, far abler judges of his relative merits than ourselves, since they lived within the sphere of his influence, hailed this grave father of our poesy. Leland, the royal antiquary of Henry the Eighth, expressed his ideas with great elegance and sensibility, when he said of Gower that "his diligent culture of our poesy had extirpated the ordinary herbs; and that the soft violet and the purple narcissus were now growing, where erst was nothing seen but the thistle and the thorn." There are indeed some graceful flowers in his desert. But all criticism is usually relative to the age, and excellence is always comparative. GOWER stamped with the force of ethical reasoning his smooth rhymes; and this was a near approach to poetry itself. If in the mind of CHAUCER we are more sensible of the impulses of genius--those creative and fugitive touches--his diction is more mixed and unsettled than the tranquil elegance of GOWER, who has often many pointed sentences and a surprising neatness of phrase. A modern reader, I think, would find the style of Gower more easily intelligible than the higher efforts of the more inventive poet.
Contemporary with GOWER and CHAUCER lived the singular author of "The Visions of William concerning PIERS PLOUGHMAN;" singular in more respects than one, for his subject, his style, and, we may add, for the intrepidity and the force of his genius.
This extraordinary work is ascribed to one whose name is merely traditional, to Robert Langland, a secular priest of Salop; when he wrote, and where he died, are as dubious as his text, the authenticity of which is often uncertain from the variations in all the manuscripts. But the real life of an author, at least for posterity, lies beyond the grave; and no writer is nameless whose volume has descended to us as one of the most memorable in our ancient vernacular literature.