have written a balade or two; and Wiclif and Langland, one at Oxford, and the other possibly at Malvern, were two young and earnest men, with the chief labors of their lives before them.

Mandeville's book was planned with distinct reference to the wants of pilgrims to Jerusalem, and contrived to subordinate accounts of the remotest travel to the form of what we might call a traveller's guide to Jerusalem by four routes, with a handbook to the holy places. The wonderful things told do not in themselves convict Mandeville of any wilful untruth. He tells of what was seen by him as matter of knowledge; in the miracles narrated to him he put faith; and all other marvels of which he heard he tells only as matter of hearsay. Mandeville died at Liege, in 1371.

5. John Wiclif, born in Yorkshire about 1324, was in 1361 master of Balliol College, Oxford, and was in that year presented by his college to the rectory of Fylingham, in Lincolnshire. Soon afterwards he resigned his mastership, and went to reside on his living. He was presently made doctor of divinity. He had a quick mind in a spare, frail body; and at the time when William Langland was writing in like spirit his "Vision of Piers Ploughman," Wiclif was showing his pure desire to restore a spiritual church. John of Gaunt was then ready, as head of the feudal party at court, to humble the pride of the prelates who claimed temporal power. He welcomed, therefore, the most innocent and self-denying Wiclif as a fellowcombatant; and when, in 1376, at the close of the reign of Edward III., Wiclif was cited as a heretic to appear at St. Paul's before the appointed ecclesiastical judges, he went thither with John of Gaunt, and Percy, the Earl Marshal of England, as supporters. This led to a brawl. The populace judged Wiclif by his companions, and saw in him one of the people's enemies. Yet he was already quietly engaged with others upon that "Translation of the Bible" which was not completed until after the death of Edward III. As nothing came of the proceedings at St. Paul's, the monks, who also looked on Wiclif as their enemy, obtained the Pope's injunction to the prelates and the university to renew process against him; but before the Pope's bulls could reach England Edward III.

was dead, and the next following changes were in Wiclif's favor.

In the year 1360 the English people had in their own current language no part of the Bible but the Psalter. Twenty years afterwards, in 1380, the devoted labor of Wiclif and his fellowworkers had produced a complete English Bible, including the Apocrypha. Wiclif began with comments on the Gospels, and in the prologue to the Gospel by Matthew strongly urged that the whole Scripture ought to be translated for the use of the laity. It was while finishing his translation, that Wiclif, whose chief work had been a Latin one, "De Dominio Divino," began to forsake the use of Latin, and wrote English tracts. In 1381 he issued a paper of twelve propositions against transubstantiation. In 1382 the Dominicans, or Black Friars, who were the custodians of orthodoxy, had in their house at London a council at which twenty-four conclusions selected from Wiclif's writings were condemned. He was banished from the university. In 1384 Wiçlif was summoned to appear before the Pope; but he was then dying from paralysis, and on the last day of that year he obeyed his summons to appear before a higher judgment-seat.

6. John Trevisa was a Cornishman, educated at Oxford, who became vicar of Berkeley, in Gloucestershire, and chaplain to Thomas, fourth Lord Berkeley. Afterwards he was canon of the collegiate church of Westbury. As a clergyman he was no friend to the monks. In the course of his life he had been to Germany and Italy; but he spent most of his days in Gloucestershire, where he occupied his leisure in translation of useful books out of Latin into his mother-tongue. He is said to have died in 1412. His most important work was his "Translation of Higden's Polychronicon," completed in 1387, and made especially for his patron, Lord Berkeley. It was prefaced by Trevisa's own "Dialogue on Translation between a Lord and a Clerk;" that is to say, his patron and himself. Moreover, Trevisa, who was a shrewd man, added a few short explanatory notes to his translation of the "Polychronicon;" and these notes, together with the "Dialogue," are of special

interest as very primitive examples of original prose in Early Modern English.

7. A writer of this period, Ralph Strode, has an undying name only because Chaucer has mentioned him. There is reason to think that he taught one of Chaucer's sons. He was a Dominican of Jedburgh Abbey, who had sought knowledge in France, Germany, and Italy, had visited the Holy Land, and was in highest credit as a theologian and philosopher about the year 1370. He wrote verse also, both Latin and English. Some of his books have been printed in Germany, but none in England.