After this Edward II. came the great Edward III.--known to us through Froissart and the Black Prince[34] and Crécy and Poitiers, and by Windsor Castle--which he built--and by Chaucer and Wyclif and Langlande and Gower, who grew up while he was king; known to us also in a worse way, for outliving all his good qualities, and becoming in his last days a peevish and tempestuous voluptuary. Some few foreign way-marks I also give, that the reader may have more distinctly in mind this great historic epoch. Dante died in exile at Ravenna, six years before Edward III. came to power. Boccaccio was then a boy of fourteen, and Petrarch nine years his elder. And on the year that Crécy was fought and won--through the prowess of the Black Prince, and when the Last of the Tribunes, as you see him in Bulwer Lytton’s novel, was feeling his way to lordship in Rome,--there was living somewhere in Shropshire, a country-born, boy poet--not yet ripened into utterance, but looking out with keen eyes and soreness of heart upon the sufferings of poor country folk, and upon the wantonness of the monks, and the extravagance of the rich, and the hatefulness of the proud--all which was set forth at a later day in the Vision of Piers Plowman. _William Langlande._ This was William Langlande[35] (or Langley, as others call him), reputed author of the poem I have named. It makes a little book--earliest, I think, of all books written in English--which you will be apt to find in a well-appointed private library of our day. I won’t say that it is bought to read, so much as to stand upon the shelves (so many books are) as a good and sufficient type of old respectabilities. Yet, for all this, it is reasonably readable; with crabbed alliterative rhythm;--some Latin intermixed, as if the writer had been a priest (as some allege); and such knowledge of life and of current shortcomings among all sorts of people as showed him to be a wide-awake and fearless observer. It is in the form of an Allegory, Christian in its motive; so that you might almost say that the author was an immature and crude and yet sharper kind of John Bunyan who would turn _Great-Heart_ into a _Plowman_. The nomenclature also brings to mind the tinker of the Pilgrim’s Progress; there is a Sir _Do-Well_ and his daughter _Do-Better_: then there is _Sir In-wit_ with his sons _See-well_ and _Say-well_ and _Hear-well_, and the doughtiest of them all--_Sir Work-well_. We may, I think, as reasonably believe that Bunyan hovered over this book, as that Milton took hints from the picture of Pandemonium attributed to Cædmon.