52 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



as the time of Henry VIII, there was for the vernacular tongue. 

 Still, even in Chaucer's time the tide, though slow, began to 

 turn. In 13S8 parliament was opened with an English speech. 

 In the law courts, cases might be carried on in English. 

 Modern English prose, if traced to its immediate source, will 

 be found to go back little further than to the books written at 

 a time not far from that date. These are Wycliffe's scripture 

 translations, Trevisas' translation of Higdon's Polychronicon, 

 and the Mandeville travels. The oldest manuscript of Sir 

 John's travels is indeed in French, and both his claim to be of 

 English birth, and his personality have been called in question. 

 He also garnishes his adventures with stories of snails having 

 shells as big as cottages, and Ethiopians who have only one 

 foot, which he says was strong enough for swift travelling 

 and large enough to shelter its owner, when recumbent, from 

 rain and sun, and other accounts which recall Lucian's satire 

 on credulous tales of his day, and the conviction that Sir John's 

 back deserves a stroke or two from the same rod. But for all 

 this " The Voyage and Travayle of Syr John Maundeville 

 Knight," in its English version, remains a delightful book to be 

 prized with the choicest treasures of early English prose. 



A life of Chaucer written with the care, fullness, and 

 insight of Lockhardt's life of Scott, Masson's Milton, or 

 Dowden's Shelley, would be an atti-active book. At this dis- 

 tance, how interesting would be the story, could it be told, of 

 Chaucer's education in the schoolroom, and in that life school 

 of many masters where all are pupils ; of the work he did and 

 the men he met; of his attitude towards his fellows, and the 

 spirit of his time ; of the motifs of his poems, and the order of 

 their production ; how his life-work w'as hindered, tried, guided 

 in the right way, and sometimes lured by false lights into 

 wrong paths ; and how his creative genius by degrees fashion- 

 ed, in the dawn of English literature, works whose beauty and 

 fidelity to nature will always be dear to lovers of the English 

 tongue. But such a work could hardly have been written at 

 the immediate close of his life, and cannot be written now. 

 The letters, journals, and other documents essential to both 



