It is a savage picture; and as savagely true as was ever drawn of Envy. Those who cultivated the elegancies of letters, and delighted in the pretty rhyming-balance of Romance verse, would hardly have relished him; but the average thinker and worker would and did. It is specially noteworthy that the existing MSS. of this poem, of which there are very many, are without expensive ornamentation by illuminated initial letters, or otherwise, indicating that its circulation was among those who did not buy a book for its luxuries of “make-up,” but for its pith. A new popularity came to the book after printing was begun, and made it known to those who sympathized with its protesting spirit;--most of all when the monasteries went down and readers saw how this old grumbler had prophesied truly--in saying “the Abbot of Abingdon and all his people should get a knock from a king”--as they did; and a hard one it was. Langlande was born in the West, and had wandered over the beautiful Malvern hills of Worcestershire in his day but he went afterward to live in London, which he knew from top to bottom; had a wife there, “Kytte,” and a daughter, “Calote;”[37] shaved his head like a priest; was tall--so tall he came to be called “Long Will.” He showed little respect for fine dresses, though he saw them all; he was in London when Chaucer was there and when the greater poet was writing, and had higher-placed friends than himself; but he never met him,--from anything that appears; never met Wyclif either, with whom he must have had very much thinking in common, and who also must have been in London many a time when tall Will Langlande sidled along Fenchurch Street, or Cornhill. Yet he is worthy to be named with him as representing a popular seam in that great drift of independent and critical thought, which was to ripen into the Reformation. _John Wyclif._ In the year when gunpowder was first burned in battle, and when Rienzi was trying to poise himself with a good balance on the rocking shoulders of the Roman people, John Wyclif, the great English reformer and the first translator of the Bible, was just turned of twenty and poring over his books, not improbably in that Balliol College, Oxford--of which in the ripeness of his age he was to become Master. We know little of his early personal history, save that he came from a beautiful Yorkshire valley in the North of England, where the Tees, forming the border line of the County of Durham, sweeps past the little parish of Wyclif, and where a manor-house of the same name--traditionally the birthplace of the Reformer--stands upon a lift of the river hank. Its grounds stretch away to those “Rokeby” woods, whose murmurs and shadows relieve the dullest of the poems of Scott.