'Thou hast brought nothing, thou hast offered nothing, brother.' Then the monk answered, 'What shall I give?' The martyr replied: 'I was born on a day called Candlemas Day, and candles I love, and therefore of course I call on thee for what candles thou hast.' And when he declared he had no candles, he added: 'Nay, brother, thou not only hast certain candles which thou didst acquire wrongly, but thou hast hidden away some of the largest and the handsomest, which thou art keeping in thy private possession. All these I desire to have, and especially the handsomer ones which thou hast determined shall be given to thy brother's wife' (p. 138). An angry colloquy ensues, in which the saint threatens Brother Richard with severe penalties unless the choicest of the stolen goods are devoted to him. 'Know of a surety,' he insists, 'whether thou wilt or not, these candles I will have.' The disregard of this injunction wonld be visited with such agony as the monk had never known. Of course the terrified man eventually complied. The whole section is a singular commentary on the text 'I hate robbery for burnt-offering.'

We have only space to notice a few side-lights cast upon the habits and manners of the age. It is observable that every priest whom Thomas names is married; and no wonder when the three immediate predecessors of Bishop Herbert were almost certainly married men. The practice of auricular confession had not been made obligatory, nor was secrecy of the essence of confession in those days, so that Wicheman had no scruple in revealing the dying confession of Aelward Ded. The legend reveals the prevalence of proper names and the circulation of more money than might have been supposed at that early date-there were licensed coiners at Norwich, and the poorest could find the threepenny fee for a candle-more education, too, of a certain kind. We presume that the Robert who slept in the church of St. Andrew for fear of the sheriff was taking sanctuary there, but the sacrist and others are spoken of as sleeping in the cathedral, and might well welcome to have lights burning before the altars. The legend bears evidence of much correspondence between distant parts of the country, and we find the prior of Lewes visiting Norwich, whilst Dr. Jessopp points out that William, a monk of Ely, was at this time Abbot of Pershore, in Worcestershire. Many superstitions and customs of the daysuch as the murderer who in his penitence bound his arm with an iron ring made of the pitchfork with which he killed his brother, and, clad in a hair shirt, spent years in seeking mercy at various shrines-are embedded in the narrative.

Dr. Jessopp's verdict on the credibility of the story and the good faith of Brother Thomas, gathered as it is from careful study of the statements made in the body of the narrative, will be of special interest. It may be summarized as follows:

One fact stands out indisputably-the finding of a boy's dead body in Thorpe Wood by Henry de Sprowston on March 24, 1144, who buried it where he found it. Godwin Sturt, the priest, now appears on the scene and recognizes the corpse as that of his wife's nephew, and she forthwith has a vision to relate about which she had never said a word till now. The evidence of the Jew's servant, of Theobald the Jew, and of that attributed to Sir William Hastings is all rejected as incredible. Almost equally improbable, or at any rate very suspicious, are other details, and the story of the birds that would not settle on the body is obviously borrowed from the Life of St. Columban.

'On the other hand,' Dr. Jessopp continues, 'it is certain that Brother Thomas did not invent the story: it was current when he first became a monk at the priory. The priest Godwin was, one cannot help suspecting, the originator of the accusation, and he comes out of it very badly. He not only got hold of the teazle, which he affirmed was the very instrument with which the Jews had tortured their victim, but he made merchandise of it for years, playing upon the credulity of simple people to extort money from them' (p. xiii).

Nor even by his own showing is the character of Brother Thomas by any means blameless.

'He appropriated candles, and assures us he forgot all about them; he stole the martyr's shoe and hid it away; he filched his teeth and told lies about them. Only when somebody else was informed of his pilferings in a vision did he go any way towards making restitution. There is some reason for suspecting that he got his office of sacrist to the martyr by revelation, and there is only one hint of his having been promoted to any of the more important offices in the priory, though at the time his book was written he had been member of the convent for more than twenty years. That indicates pretty clearly that he was not trusted by the brethren, and that successive priors, in whose hands all the patronage of the monastery lay, kept him at arm's length and did not promote him to any responsible office. Yet it would be rash and unwarrantable to insinuate that he was from first to last a cunning and designing rogue. In an age of measureless credulity, when doubt is reckoned devil-born, and unquestioning acquiescence in the dominant beliefs of the day is apt to be regarded as more meritorious than the practice of the lowly virtues of uprightness and tolerance, even good and fervent men, and much more those who are very zealous for

what they hold to be a great cause, can easily persuade themselves to accept without hesitation or demur the conclusions of those in authority. Unconsciously they get to subject their reason to their interest or their inclinations, till their mental condition becomes one of miserable intellectual torpor, and, the critical faculty being paralysed, they lose the power of distinguishing truth from falsehood. It is very easy to call such men impostors : it is wiser to remember that in every age there have been examples of this type, men and women of whom it has been said that they are deceivers and being deceived"; and yet it would be hard, perhaps impossible, to say when and how the one merged into the other' (Introduction, pp. xiii-xiv).

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Whatever our judgment on the moral character of Thomas of Monmouth, of the disastrous influence of his work there can be no question. Stories of ritual child-murder committed by the Jews-as baseless as the hideous slanders circulated against the Knights Templars in the fourteenth century and the religious houses in the sixteenth-inflamed the popular hatred which culminated in the massacre of Jews at the coronation of Richard I., and which was repeated the following year at Norwich and elsewhere. To the influence of the work before us its editors assign the tremendous responsibility of first stirring up 'that mighty wave of superstitious credulity, unreasoning hate, and insatiable ferocity which has not yet spent itself, though more than seven centuries have passed since Thomas took his pen in hand' (Introduction, p. xlv).

ART. VII.—ENGLISH POETRY FROM WYATT TO MARLOWE.

A History of English Poetry. By W. J. COURTHOPE, C.B., M.A., D.Litt., Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. Vol. II. (London, 1897.)

MR. COURTHOPE'S History of English Poetry promises to stretch to colossal dimensions. The first volume, which we reviewed on its appearance two years ago, dealt with the origines, and brought the story down to the end of the school of Chaucer; the second, which we now have before us, carries it no further than Spenser and the early dramatists, the predecessors of Shakespeare. It covers a period of some seventy years, from 1525 to 1595; and when it is remembered that during the earlier half of this period poets were still few and far between, that English poetry at the end of it is but

starting on its great career, that three hundred years still remain to be dealt with, in which the number of noticeable poets continually increases, it will be seen that many volumes are likely to be required before Mr. Courthope can lay down his pen. The period now under notice contains but one poet of the first rank, Edmund Spenser, just as the period covered by the first volume contained none but Geoffrey Chaucer; in the volumes that are to come we have still to look for Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Scott, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, and Browning, with a vastly increasing multitude of poets of lesser eminence than these, but requiring adequate notice. Truly an ample prospect lies before Mr. Courthope and his readers.

For Mr. Courthope this prospect is one of much labour, and we would hope of some enjoyment too; for his readers it is one of much interest, but also of some little labour. Mr. Courthope has many of the qualities which go to make a good critic and historian. He has wide reading, he has earnestness of purpose, he has sobriety of judgment, he has a capacity for taking pains. But for some reason which is not quite easy to analyse, he is apt to be somewhat heavy in the reading. The author of the delightful Paradise of Birds cannot be supposed to be wanting in vivacity, and the traditions of the professorial chair once held by Matthew Arnold do not require its occupant to be professorially dull; yet Mr. Courthope's History, with all its solid merits of learning and taste, fails to arouse the enthusiasm of which its splendid subject is capable. It may be that Mr. Courthope does not feel such an enthusiasm himself, at least for the periods and the poetry with which he has hitherto dealt; and in literary criticism, if anywhere, the Horatian rule is true, si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi. Or it may be that he is afraid of indulging his feelings too freely, and that the responsibility of sitting in judgment upon all English poets weighs somewhat heavily upon him. In either case the fact remains that the reader will turn to his pages rather for information than for inspiration, for sober reflection on the character and development of English poetry rather than for an enthusiastic appreciation of the great heritage into which the Englishspeaking nations of the earth are born.

The period to which our attention is now invited contains, as has been said above, one poet of great and permanent value, in the person of Spenser. It contains likewise one poet of unquestionable genius, though of unequal and undeveloped performance, Christopher Marlowe. There are also two or

three authors a few of whose pieces have fully earned their entrance into those anthologies which glean from among the minor poets the scattered flowers which still retain their life and fragrance for readers of to-day, such as Sidney, Lodge, and Greene. The rest of the writers of this period have a relative rather than an absolute value. They are interesting, sometimes even admirable, for their contributions to the development of our literature. They may have added something to the metrical capabilities of our language, or introduced some fresh fashion or inspiration from abroad. Studied in their proper place in the history of our poetry, they fall into an order and sequence which is interesting to the student of literature; and one who has immersed himself in the records and writings of the period may be able to realize somewhat of the position which they held in the eyes of their contemporaries. But taken out of their own surroundings they lose their vitality. Their metrical achievements have been surpassed by their followers, their sentiments have been better expressed by later poets, their defects are painfully prominent in the eyes of those who have been brought up upon Tennyson and Swinburne. Spenser will be read by all lovers of beautiful poetry as long as the English language lives, for his own sake and not for his historical position; but can it be honestly said that there is any other than an antiquarian and historical, or biographical, interest in Sackville, Gascoigne, Churchyard, or even, if Mr. Courthope will allow us to say so, in Surrey and Wyatt? Their value now is for the student of literature rather than for the lover of poetry.

Historically, however, writers such as these, and others who have not yet been mentioned, hold an interesting place in our literature. Put in the briefest way, the sixteenth century marks the rise of poetry in social status, as the result of the spread of literary tastes among the upper classes of society. During the Middle Ages, literature was either clerical or professional. Before the dawn of the Renaissance, it was almost wholly in the hands of monks; and when it passed out of the cloister into the world, it was still practised mainly by men of middle or low rank, who earned their living by their pen. Even Chaucer, who rose higher in the social scale than most of his fellows, was the dependent rather than the friend of the great persons among whom, for a time, he moved. But soon after the invention of printing, literature became fashionable. It was an age of intellectual ferment, which pervaded all classes. Even kings, such as Henry VIII., became authors, instead of being merely patrons of authors. Theo