I find no fault with the author of Piers Ploughman for not being a poet. Every man cannot be a poet (fortunately), nor every poet a great one. It is the privilege of the great to be always contemporaneous, to speak of fugacious events in words that shall be perennial. But to the poets of the second rate we go for pictures of manners that have passed away, for transitory facts, for modes of life and ways of thinking that were circumstantial merely. They give us reflections of our outward, as their larger brethren do of our inward, selves. They deal, as it were, with costume; the other with man himself. But these details are of interest, so fond are we of facts. We all have seen the congregation which grew sleepy while the preacher talked of the other world give a stir of pleased attention if he brought in a personal anecdote about _this_. Books are written and printed, and we read them to tell us how our forefathers cocked their hats, or turned up the points of their shoes; when blacking and starch were introduced; who among the Anglo-Saxons carried the first umbrella, and who borrowed it. These trifles, also, acquire importance in proportion as they are older. If a naturalist showed us a toad, we should be indifferent, but if he told us that it had been found in a block of granite, we should instantly look with profound interest on a creature that perhaps ate moths in Abel’s garden, or hopped out of the path of Lamech. And the same precious jewel of instruction we find in the ugly little facts embedded in early literatures. They teach us the unchangeableness of man and his real independence of his accidents. He is the same old lay figure under all his draperies, and sits to one artist for a John and to another for a Judas, and serves equally well for both portraits. The oldest fable reappears in the newest novel. Aristophanes makes coats that fit us still. Voltaire is Lucian translated into the eighteenth century. Augustus turns up in Louis Napoleon. The whirligig of Time brings back at regular intervals the same actors and situations, and under whatever names--Ormuzd and Ahriman, Protestantism and Catholicism, Reform and Conservatism, Transcendentalism and Realism. We see the same ancient quarrel renewed from generation to generation, till we begin to doubt whether this be truly the steps of a Tower of Babel that we are mounting, and not rather a treadmill, where we get all the positive good of the exercise and none of the theoretic ill which might come if we could once solve the problem of getting above ourselves. Man’s life continues to be, as the Saxon noble described it, the flight of a sparrow through a lighted hall, out of one darkness and into another, and the two questions _whence?_ and _whither?_ were no tougher to Adam than to us. The author of Piers Ploughman’s Vision has offered us his theory of this world and the next, and in doing so gives some curious hints of modes of life and of thought. It is