Then Skelton the laureate, in his long song upon the death of Philip Sparrow (which recalls the exquisite gem of Catullus in a like threnody), takes occasion to say:— "Gower's englysshè is olde, And of no valúe is tolde; His mattér is worth gold, And worthy to be enrold." And again:— Gower that first garnishèd our English rude." Old Puttenham also bears this testimony:—"But of them all [the English poets] particularly this is myne opinion, that Chaucer, with Gower, Lidgate, and Harding, for their antiquitie ought to have the first place." Taine dismisses him with little more than a fillip, and Lowell, while discoursing appreciatively on Chaucer, says:— "Gower has positively raised tediousness to the precision of science; he has made dullness an heirloom for the students of our literary history. As you slip to and fro on the frozen levels of his verse, which give no foothold to the mind; as your nervous ear awaits the inevitable recurrence of his rhyme, regularly pertinacious as the tick of an eight-day clock, and reminding you of Wordsworth's 'Once more the ass did lengthen out The hard dry seesaw of his horrible bray,' [Pg 6583] you learn to dread, almost to respect, the powers of this indefatigable man. He is the undertaker of the fair mediæval legend, and his style has the hateful gloss, the seemingly unnatural length, of a coffin." Yet hear Morley:— "To this day we hear among our living countrymen, as was to be heard in Gower's time and long before, the voice passing from man to man, that in spite of admixture with the thousand defects incident to human character, sustains the keynote of our literature, and speaks from the soul of our history the secret of our national success. It is the voice that expresses the persistent instinct of the English mind to find out what is unjust among us and undo it, to find out duty to be done and do it, as God's bidding.... In his own Old English or Anglo-Saxon way he tries to put his soul into his work. Thus in the 'Vox Clamantis' we have heard him asking that the soul of his book, not its form, be looked to; and speaking the truest English in such sentences as that 'the eye is blind and the ear deaf, that convey nothing down to the heart's depth; and the heart that does not utter what it knows is as a live coal under ashes. If I know little, there may be another whom that little will help.... But to the man who believes in God, no power is unattainable if he but rightly feels his work; he ever has enough, whom God increases.' This is the old spirit of Cædmon and of Bede; in which are laid, while the earth lasts, the strong foundations of our literature. It was the strength of such a temper in him that made Gower strong. 'God knows,' he says again, 'my wish is to be useful; that is the prayer that directs my labor.' And while he thus touches the root of his country's philosophy, the form of his prayer—that what he has written may be what he would wish it to be—is still a