"The Pricke of Conscience" is in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, about 10,000 lines in all, and is the work of a singular person, Richard Rolle, who, after being a wandering hermit, settled at Hampole, and died in 1349. A Latin biographer of Richard states that he was born at Thornton in the diocese of York, was well educated by the care of his parents, was sent to Oxford by Thomas Neville, Archdeacon of Durham, and made good progress in his studies, especially in theology. In his nineteenth year he left the temptations of Oxford, went home, and turned two dresses of his sister's, one white, one gray, into what he thought the appropriate costume of a hermit, covering his head with his father's rain-hood. His sister fled from before him, thinking him insane: he took Lady Dalton's seat in church, was allowed to preach a sermon, and was kindly received by the lady's husband, Sir John. In a cell provided by the knight he had unspeakable raptures, and felt as if he were being burned by a physical fire, which proved to be that of Divine love. Some ladies found him writing at a great pace, while he simultaneously discoursed to them for two hours. It seems to follow that either his writing or his preaching was "automatic". He wrought some miracles of healing, and he must have written rapidly indeed if he produced all the works attributed to him, His prose treatises of religion are as fervent as the Letters of Samuel Rutherford, the Covenanter: his anecdotes of his own temptation by the phantasm of "a full, fair young woman" who loved him dearly; and of a repentant scholar, who wrote out a list of his own sins which vanished from the paper, are interesting. He allows that the brains of eagerly pious people sometimes "turn in their heads," thereby causing empty hallucinations, and the hearing of wonderful songs that are merely subjective impressions. This strange being, with the ardour of Crashaw, had something of Crashaw's poetic fire. Minot. The verses of Laurence Minot, celebrating events from 1333 to 1352 are of almost no literary merit. The Muse of Laurence is the patriotic; he crows, for example, over the defeat of the Scots by English archers at Halidon Hill, in 1333, but he merely babbles in the vague, and does not give a single detail as to the fighting. When he promises to tell of the battle of Bannockburn, in place of doing that he glories in the recovery of Berwick by Edward III. The best praise we can give him is that he loved to celebrate the victories of his countrymen; and had at his command many metres that were ready for some better poet to use. It must also be admitted that there are very few successes in our British essays in patriotic poetry, and that an enemy of the Scots, as Minot was, may be not impartially judged by a critic of that race. CHAPTER VII. THE ROMANCES IN RHYME.