cts which had prevailed before
Chaucer.

In the history of every literature the development of prose is later
than that of verse. The latter being, by its very form, artificial, is
cultivated as a fine art, and its records preserved in an early stage
of society, when prose is simply the talk of men, and not thought
worthy of being written and kept. English prose labored under the
added disadvantage of competing with Latin, which was the cosmopolitan
tongue and the medium of communication between scholars of all
countries. Latin was the language of the Church, and in the Middle
Ages churchman and scholar were convertible terms. The word _clerk_
meant either priest or scholar. Two of the _Canterbury Tales_ are in
prose, as is also the _Testament of Love_, formerly ascribed to
Chaucer, and the style of all these is so feeble, wandering, and
unformed that it is hard to believe that they were written by the same
man who wrote the _Knight's Tale_ and the story of _Griselda_. _The
Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundeville_--the forerunner of that
great library of Oriental travel which has enriched our modern
literature--was written, according to its author, first in Latin, then
in French, and, lastly, in the year 1356, translated into English for
the behoof of "lordes and knyghtes and othere noble and worthi men,
that conne not Latyn but litylle." The author professed to have spent
over thirty years in Eastern travel, to have penetrated as far {47} as
Farther India and the "iles that ben abouten Indi," to have been in the
service of the Sultan of Babylon in his wars against the Bedouins, and,
at another time, in the employ of the Great Khan of Tartary. But there
is no copy of the Latin version of his travels extant; the French seems
to be much later than 1356, and the English MS. to belong to the early
years of the fifteenth century, and to have been made by another hand.
Recent investigations make it probable that Maundeville borrowed his
descriptions of the remoter East from many sources, and particularly
from the narrative of Odoric, a Minorite friar of Lombardy, who wrote
about 1330. Some doubt is even cast upon the existence of any such
person as Maundeville. Whoever wrote the book that passes under his
name, however, would seem to have visited the Holy Land, and the part
of the "voiage" that describes Palestine and the Levant is fairly close
to the truth. The rest of the work, so far as it is not taken from