have devoted themselves to the exposition of the debt which modern civilization owes to the Middle Ages.

Tracing the mediaeval element in fourteenth-century literature, the writer distinguishes 'two schools, the Chaucerian and the West Midland, representing two great voices in the harmonies of English poetry', the one mainly artistic, the other mainly moral and didactic. In the poet of the Pearl these two are blended, and it is for this reason that 'he, in a sense more truly than Chaucer, is the herald of the Elizabethan poets'. Spenser is his literary descendant, in whom the mediaeval spirit finds its fullest expression in Elizabethan times. That same spirit rescued the drama from subservience to classical rules, and helped it to unite the freedom of the Old Teutonic alliterative metre with the form of academic

blank verse. Later and more consciously, the influence of mediaevalism is wooed by the poets of the Romantic Revival-in the pioneer work of Percy, Macpherson, Ossian, Gray, and Chatterton, and in the maturer romantic poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, and above all Morris, the most thoroughly mediaeval of modern English poets.

Last among this year's critical writings stands a welcome new edition, revised, reset, and freshly illustrated, of that compendium of good things, Jusserand's English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages. It seems hardly necessary to describe a work of which ten impressions have been exhausted since its first appearance as a translation in 1889. The life of the open road was (and has remained until its recent lamentable obscuration by heavy motor traffic) one with the life of the English country-side, and in the fourteenth century it might serve as an introduction to members of every order of society, secular and religious, from the juggler, the pedlar, and the outlaw to the pilgrim of high or of low rank in the social and ecclesiastical hierarchy.

This theme is developed by M. Jusserand, and great value is added to his exposition by the sixty-eight excellent illustrations providing visual proof of the rich and varied circumstance of mediaeval life in the fourteenth century. These, probably, give rise

6 English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (14th century), by J. J. Jusserand, translated from the French by L. Toulmin Smith. London: Fisher Unwin. New ed. 1920. 416 pp. + App. 22 pp. 25s. net.

to the one regrettable feature of the book; it weighs close upon 3 lb., and is consequently unpleasant to handle.

We now turn to books presenting more of the raw material of scholarship. A surprising amount of such work stands to the credit of the Early English Text Society. This is partly due to difficulty of production during and immediately after the War, which has delayed till 1920-2 the appearance of several volumes intended for issue at a much earlier date.

It is pleasant to take up a new volume bearing the honoured name of Dr. Furnivall. This small book, entitled The Gild of St. Mary, Lichfield' contains some Gild Ordinances of Richard II and of Sir Humfrey Stanley, Dean Heywood's Reform of Our Lady's Alms-Chest, the first and second extant Charters of the Lichfield Tailors and Smiths, and a few other fragments. The editorial matter is very slight, but we recognize the personal touch of our old friend in the marginal summaries, and in the relegation to oblivion of another Ordinance-'It has twenty-three clauses founded almost wholly on the foregoing Ordinances. I don't think it worth printing.' The Ordinances chosen for reproduction have appeared before in Harwood's History of Lichfield, 1807, but have here been made more accessible. They are first-rate specimens of their type.

The English writings of the Bishop and Cardinal John Fisher were issued by the Early English Text Society under the editorship of Professor Mayor in 1876. To these Mr. Bayne added shortly before his death a transcript of the MS. Life of Fisher in the British Museum ascribed to Richard Hall.R

The Life contains a variety of information, relating, not merely to Fisher himself, but to such topics as the founding of St. John's College, Cambridge, Fisher's relations with Luther and Wolsey, the marriage of Catharine of Aragon, the death of Henry VII, and the matrimonial and ecclesiastical affairs of Henry VIII.

7 The Gild of St. Mary, Lichfield, ed. by the late Dr. F. J. Furnivall. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, for E.E.T.S. 1920. 82 pp. 15s. net.

The Life of Fisher, transcribed from MS. Harleian 6382 by the Rev. Ronald Bayne, M.A. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, for E.E.T.S. 1921. 140 pp. 15s. net.

Finally, it is told how Fisher, refusing to subscribe by oath to the establishment of the King's succession, was sent to the Tower at the same time as Sir Thomas Moore. The gift of a Cardinal's hat from the Pope did not avert his fate, Henry's comment being'Let the Pope send him a hatt when he will, but I will so provide that when soever it commeth he shall weare it on his shoulders, for head shall he have none to sett it on. Upon the evidence of Rich, Fisher was condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered; and the weak and sickly old man died with the high courage of a Socrates, his martyrdom increasing the odium already incurred by the miserable King, and Ann Bullen, 'cheef persecutor of this holy man'.

Save for some final pages of moralizing, the Life is written with a vividness and sympathy which hold the reader's attention throughout. It is interesting to observe traces of the dawning fashion of euphuism in the repetitional or punning tendency of some of the sentences, e. g. [By this] (the 'fresh and lively' colour in Fisher's cheeks after decapitation) 'was notifyed to the worlde the innocencie and holines of this blessed father, that thus innocently was contented to loose his head in defence of his mothers heade, the holy Catholick Church of Christ'.

A certain amount of biographical material exists concerning the early fifteenth-century bishop of St. Asaph, Reginald Pecock, of whom Edward IV wrote to the Pope as 'a monstrous promoter of iniquity and perdition'. Of his six surviving works, however, little is generally known, and the Donet, of which like the rest only one copy is extant, has not previously been edited. Miss Hitchcock's treatment of the unique Bodleian MS.9 is thorough and conscientious in a high degree. The moral treatise itself differs little in general tone and structure from many other examples of its type, save that it contains some evidence of more independent thought and a wider culture. But its relation to Pecock's better-known Poore Mennis Myrrour, and the place of both in his carefully mapped-out philosophy of religion (a philosophy which exalts reason as 'the largist book of autorite that euer god made') are of some interest. To Pecock, as the editor

• The Donet, by Reginald Pecock, D.D., ed. by Elsie V. Hitchcock, B.A. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, for E.E.T.S., 1921. xxii+270 pp. 35s. net.

observes, 'religion is a logical necessity, reason is a religious necessity'. He anticipates the Age of Reason, while at the same time perpetuating the mediaeval fusion of philosophy with theology, to the detriment of both.

Pecock's dialect is mainly East Midland, but with characteristics distinguishing it from the contemporary London speech.

Another early fifteenth-century MS. is that which through the care of Professor Gollancz and the industry of Miss Day has been secured for the British Museum, and happily named the Wheatley MS.,10 in memory of Dr. Wheatley, who served the Early English Text Society as Honorary Secretary and as Treasurer till his death in 1917. The contents of this MS. are exceedingly varied; it is in fact an anthology, containing some items hitherto unknown, notably An Orison on the Passion, A Prayer to the Blessed Virgin, and A Hymn to St. John the Baptist. The pieces are in different dialects, among which the East Midland preponderates. Miss Day has supplied a good Preface (which would be better named an Introduction), Notes, and Glossary-the two latter commendably brief and business-like.

11

Notes and articles dealing with Middle English philology are this year somewhat numerous. Good textual notes and an exceptionally full glossary to the dialogue entitled Vices and Virtues,' dating from about 1200, have been written by Dr. F. Holthausen. Englische Studien for 1921 12 contains a short but suggestive article by O. Funke, Zur Wortgeschichte der französischen Elemente im Englischen, with lists of French words found in certain twelfthand thirteenth-century writings.

In an interesting article on Grammatical and Natural Gender in Middle English 13 Mr. Moore discusses the substitution of the

10 The Wheatley Manuscript, ed. from Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 39574, by Mabel Day, Litt.D. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, for E.E.T.S., 1921. 30s. net.

11 Vices and Virtues, ed. by Ferd. Holthausen, Ph.D. Part II: Notes and Glossary. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, for E.E.T.S., 1921. 116 pp. 12s. net.

12 Englische Studien, 55. Band, 1. Heft. Leipzig, 1921.

13 Grammatical and Natural Gender in Middle English, by Samuel Moore. (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, xxxvi, no. 1, March 1921.)

latter for the former during the ME. period. Most scholars agree that loss of grammatical gender was due to the disappearance of the gender-distinguishing forms of the strong adjective, the definite article, and the demonstrative and other pronouns. But they have hitherto failed to correlate with this the further fact of the reten

tion of such forms in the personal pronouns. Mr. Moore's argument is that natural gender came in by way of the personal pronouns', in which grammatical and natural gender very seldom conflicted; and this he develops with much care and skill, illustrating his thesis by means of numerous examples.

Anglia for January 1921 contains 14 an instalment of Georg Dubislav's interesting detached notes on points of Middle English syntax. Probably the most noteworthy contribution to language study in a recent periodical is Mr. Lindkvist's fifty-page article (virtually a treatise) in the same number, on the origin of the pronoun she.15 Step by step Mr. Lindkvist demonstrates the weakness of hitherto accepted or suggested theories; and having demolished their claim, he proceeds to build up carefully and skilfully a new explanation, i. e. that the Old Northumbrian hio developed into hjo, jo, in the first of which the j became consonantal and very slightly sounded. This form, by false division with the third person singular present indicative of verbs in phrases like hafes hio, was hio, became shjo, scho; and another blend of scho with he or 3e, taking place in the N. E. M. dialect, produced sche and she, which occur first in the Peterborough Chronicle of 1140 A. D. The chief difficulty in establishing this theory arises from the scantiness of Northern material in the Early ME. period. Mr. Lindkvist frankly admits the gaps in his evidence, and thereby predisposes us all the more to accept a hypothesis which appears eminently sound and rational.

The year's Modern Philology contains several noteworthy articles. Mr. Bryan 16 disputes the usually accepted explanation of the Pres. Indic. suffix e(n), which he calls 'the most marked single characteristic of the Midland dialect', as due to analogy with the

14 Studien zur mittelenglischen Syntax, III, Georg Dubislav.

16 On the Origin and History of the English Pronoun She, Harald Lindkvist. (Anglia, Band xlv, Erstes Heft.)

16 The Midland Present Plural Indicative ending e(n), by W. F. Bryan. (Modern Philology, xviii, no. 9, January 1921.)