But I must not leave Chaucer’s immediate times, without speaking of other men who belonged there: the first is John Gower--a poet whom I name from a sense of duty rather than from any special liking for what he wrote. He was a man of learning for those days--having a good estate too, and living in an orderly Kentish home, to which he went back and forth in an eight-oared barge upon the Thames. He wrote a long Latin poem _Vox Clamantis_, in which like Langlande he declaimed against the vices and pretensions of the clergy; and he also treated in the high-toned conservative way of a well-to-do country gentleman, the social troubles of the time, which had broken out into Wat Tyler and Jack Straw rebellions;--people should be wise and discreet and religious; then, such troubles would not come. A better known poem of Gower--because written in English--was the _Confessio Amantis_: Old Classic, and Romance tales come into it, and are fearfully stretched out; and there are pedagogic Latin rubrics at the margin, and wearisome repetitions, with now and then faint scent of prettinesses stolen from French _fabliaux_: but unless your patience is heroic, you will grow tired of him; and the monotonous, measured, metallic jingle of his best verse is provokingly like the “Caw-caw” of the prim, black raven. He had art, he had learning, he had good-will; but he could not weave words into the thrush-like melodies of Chaucer. Even the clear and beautiful type of the Bell & Daldy edition[54] does not make him entertaining. You will tire before you are half through the Prologue, which is as long, and stiff as many a sermon. And if you skip to the stories, they will not win you to liveliness: Pauline’s grace, and mishaps are dull; and the sharp, tragic twang about Gurmunde’s skull, and the vengeance of Rosemunde (from the old legend which Paul the Deacon tells) does not wake one’s blood. In his later years he was religiously inclined; was a patron and, for a time, resident of the Priory which was attached to the church, now known as St. Saviour’s, and standing opposite to the London Bridge Station in Southwark. In that church may now be found the tomb of Gower and his effigy in stone, with his head resting on “the likeness of three books which he compiled.”