rex regum necessitat et vult efficaciter, quod non vagat. Dicit etiam quod domi oportet ipsum eligere Pontificam Iesum Christum, quod est gravis necessitas eo, quod cum ejus omissione vel negligentia non potest Romanus Pontifex vel aliquis angelus dispensare.”[35] The words seem to imply not only that he was cited to appear before the Pope, but that in declining to obey the papal summons, he could plead bodily infirmity, the will of the King of kings, and also the prohibition of the only earthly sovereign to whom he owed a subject’s duty. Shirley, writing in 1858, says—“From his retreat at Lutterworth they summoned him before the papal court. The citation did not reach him till 1384.”[36] If so, then his tract “De Citationibus Frivolis” was one of the last of the many writings that proceeded from his pen. Before we make the briefest possible reference to the last and greatest work of Wycliffe—his translation of the Bible—we may here allude to the marvellous productiveness of the mind of this great Englishman of the fourteenth century. In this respect, as in other characteristics of his genius, there is only one other name in English literature that is entitled to take rank and place beside John Wycliffe, and that is the name of William Shakespeare. Chaucer and Langland and Gower, the contemporaries of Wycliffe, wrote much, and wrote so as not only to prove the previously unknown capabilities of the half-formed English language for giving expression to every variety of poetical conception, but these illustrious poets also so wrote as to be the forerunners and the leaders of those who, since the time when the English mind was set free by the Reformation, have marched, and continue to march, as the poets of England in splendid equipage in their proud procession through the ages. But the intellectual and literary productiveness of Chaucer and Langland and Gower comes far short of the truly extraordinary productiveness of the genius of Wycliffe. Nothing but ignorance of what Wycliffe did for the highest forms of thought in the University, for the dignity and independence of the State, for truth and freedom in the Church, and for virtue and godliness among the English people, and through them among all the nations of the world, can account for the indifference to the name and memory of Wycliffe, which prevails not in Oxford alone, but throughout the country:—