3. SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE, (+1300-1372+), “the first prose-writer in formed English,” was born at St Albans, in Hertfordshire, in the year 1300. He was a physician; but, in the year 1322, he set out on a journey to the East; was away from home for more than thirty years, and died at Liège, in Belgium, in 1372. He wrote his travels first in Latin, next in French, and then turned them into English, “that every man of my nation may understand it.” The book is a kind of guide-book to the Holy Land; but the writer himself went much further east-- reached Cathay or China, in fact. He introduced a large number of French words into our speech, such as _cause_, _contrary_, _discover_, _quantity_, and many hundred others. His works were much admired, read, and copied; indeed, hundreds of manuscript copies of his book were made. There are nineteen still in the British Museum. The book was not printed till the year 1499-- that is, twenty-five years after printing was introduced into this country. Many of the Old English inflexions still survive in his style. Thus he says: “Machamete was born in Arabye, that was a pore knave (boy) that kepte cameles that went_en_ with marchantes for marchandise.” 4. JOHN WYCLIF (his name is spelled in about forty different ways)-- +1324-1384+-- was born at Hipswell, near Richmond, in Yorkshire, in the year 1324, and died at the vicarage of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, in 1384. His fame rests on two bases-- his efforts as a reformer of the abuses of the Church, and his complete translation of the +Bible+. This work was finished in 1383, just one year before his death. But the translation was not done by himself alone; the larger part of the Old Testament version seems to have been made by Nicholas de Hereford. Though often copied in manuscript, it was not printed for several centuries. Wyclif’s New Testament was printed in 1731, and the Old Testament not until the year 1850. But the words and the style of his translation, which was read and re-read by hundreds of thoughtful men, were of real and permanent service in fixing the language in the form in which we now find it. 5. JOHN GOWER (+1325-1408+) was a country gentleman of Kent. As Mandeville wrote his travels in three languages, so did Gower his poems. Almost all educated persons in the fourteenth century could read and write with tolerable and with almost equal ease, English, French, and Latin. His three poems are the +Speculum Meditantis+ (“The Mirror of the Thoughtful Man”), in French; the +Vox Clamantis+ (“Voice of One Crying”), in Latin; and +Confessio Amantis+ (“The Lover’s Confession”), in English. No manuscript of the first work is known to exist. He was buried in St Saviour’s, Southwark, where his effigy is still to be seen-- his head resting on his three works. Chaucer called him “the moral Gower”; and his books are very dull, heavy, and difficult to read.