ungry living as clerk in the church. His real life
meanwhile was that of a seer, a prophet after Isaiah's own heart, if we may
judge by the prophecy which soon found a voice in _Piers Plowman_. In 1399,
after the success of his great work, he was possibly writing another poem
called _Richard the Redeless_, a protest against Richard II; but we are not
certain of the authorship of this poem, which was left unfinished by the
assassination of the king. After 1399 Langland disappears utterly, and the
date of his death is unknown.

PIERS PLOWMAN. "The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye
the way of the Lord," might well be written at the beginning of this
remarkable poem. Truth, sincerity, a direct and practical appeal to
conscience, and a vision of right triumphant over wrong,--these are the
elements of all prophecy; and it was undoubtedly these elements in _Piers
Plowman_ that produced such an impression on the people of England. For
centuries literature had been busy in pleasing the upper classes chiefly;
but here at last was a great poem which appealed directly to the common
people, and its success was enormous. The whole poem is traditionally
attributed to Langland; but it is now known to be the work of several
different writers. It first appeared in 1362 as a poem of eighteen hundred
lines, and this may have been Langland's work. In the next thirty years,
during the desperate social conditions which led to Tyler's Rebellion, it
was repeatedly revised and enlarged by different hands till it reached its
final form of about fifteen thousand lines.

The poem as we read it now is in two distinct parts, the first containing
the vision of Piers, the second a series of visions called "The Search for
Dowel, Dobet, Dobest" (do well, better, best). The entire poem is in
strongly accented, alliterative lines, something like _Beowulf_, and its
immense popularity shows that the common people still cherished this easily
memorized form of Saxon poetry. Its tremendous appeal to justice and common
honesty, its clarion call to every man, whether king, priest, noble, or
laborer, to do his Christian duty, takes from it any trace of prejudice or
bigotry with which such works usually abound. Its loyalty to the Church,
while denouncing abuses that had crept into it in that period, was one of
the great influences which led to the Reformation in England. Its two great
principles, the equality of men before God and the dignity of