inveighing against clerical abuses and the rapacity of the friars,
of representing the miseries caused by the great pestilences then
prevalent, and by the hasty and ill-advised marriages consequent
thereon; of denouncing lazy workmen and sham beggars, the corruption
and bribery then too common in the law-courts--in a word, to lash all
the numerous forms of falsehood, which are at all times the fit
subjects for satire and indignant exposure. Amid many essential
differences, is there not here a striking likeness to the work of the
Roman Juvenal? Langland's satire is not so fiery nor so rhetorically
intense as that of his prototype, but it is less profoundly despairing.
He satirizes evil rather by exposing it and contrasting it with good,
than by vehemently denouncing it. The colours of the pictures are
sombre, and the gloom is almost overwhelming, but still it is illumined
from time to time with the hope of coming amendment, when the great
reformer Piers the Plowman, by which is typified Christ,[5] should
appear, who was to remedy all abuses and restore the world to a right
condition. In this sustaining hope he differs from Juvenal, the
funereal gloom of whose satires is relieved by no gleam of hope for the
future.

Contrast with this the humorous brightness, the laughter, and the light
of the surroundings associated with his great contemporary, Geoffrey
Chaucer. His very satire is kindly and quaint, like that of Horace,
rather than bitterly acidulous. He raps his age over the knuckles, it
is true, for its faults and foibles, but the censor's face wears a
genial smile. One of his chief attractions for us lies in his bright
objectivity. He never wears his heart on his sleeve like Langland. He
has touches of rare and profound pathos, but these notes of pain are
only like undertones of discord to throw the harmony into stronger
relief, only like little cloudlets momentarily flitting across the
golden sunshine of his humour.

We read Chaucer, as we read Horace, from love of his piquant
Epicureanism, and the scintillating satire wherewith he enlivens those
matchless pictures of his epoch which he has handed down to us.
Chaucer, as Professor Minto puts it, wrote largely for the court
circle. His verses were first read in tapestried chambers, and to the
gracious ear of stately lords and ladies. It was because he wrote for
such an audience that he avoids the introduction of any discordant
element in the shape of the deeper and