l progress. It
was not by his theological learning that Wyclif was brought into living
contact with the current of popular thought and feeling. The
Universities were thriving exceedingly on the scholastic glories of
previous ages; but the ascendancy was passing away to which Oxford had
attained over Paris--during the earlier middle ages, and again in the
fifteenth century until the advent of the Renascence, the central
university of Europe in the favourite study of scholastic philosophy
and theology.

But we must turn from particular classes and ranks of men to the whole
body of the population, exclusively of that great section of it which
unhappily lay outside the observation of any but a very few
writers--whether poets or historians. In the people at large we may,
indeed, easily discern in this period the signs of an advance towards
that self-government which is the true foundation of our national
greatness. But on the other hand it is impossible not to observe how,
while the moral ideas of the people wore still under the control of the
Church, the State in its turn still ubiquitously interfered in the
settlement of the conditions of social existence, fixing prices,
controlling personal expenditure, regulating wages. Not until England
had fully attained to the character of a commercial country, which it
was coming gradually to assume, did its inhabitants begin to understand
the value of that which has gradually come to distinguish ours among
the nations of Europe, viz. the right of individual Englishmen, as well
as of the English people, to manage their own affairs for themselves.
This may help to explain what can hardly fail to strike a reader of
Chaucer and of the few contemporary remains of our literature. About
our national life in this period, both in its virtues and in its vices,
there is something--it matters little whether we call it--childlike or
childish; in its "apert" if not in its privy sides it lacks the
seriousness belonging to men and to generations, who have learnt to
control themselves, instead of relying on the control of others.

In illustration of this assertion, appeal might be made to several of
the most salient features in the social life of the period. The
extravagant expenditure in dress, fostered by a love of pageantry of
various kinds encouraged by both chivalry and the Church, has been
already referred to; it was by no means distinctive of any one class of
the population. Among t