In a word, the author’s literary sphere may be a limited one, and his conception of excellence within that sphere may fall very far short of the highest standard, but such as his ideals are, he is able very completely to realize them. The French and English elements of the language, instead of still maintaining a wilful strife, as is so often the case in Chaucer’s metre, are here combined in harmonious alliance. More especially we must recognize the fact that in Gower’s English verse we have a consistent and for the moment a successful attempt to combine the French syllabic with the English accentual system of metre, and this without sacrificing the purity of the language as regards forms of words and grammatical inflexion. We shall see in our subsequent investigations how careful and ingenious he is in providing by means of elision and otherwise for the legitimate suppression of those weak terminations which could not find a place as syllables in the verse without disturbing its accentual flow, while at the same time the sense of their existence was not to be allowed to disappear. The system was too difficult and complicated to be possible except for a specially trained hand, and Gower found no successor in his enterprise; but the fact that the attempt was made is at least worthy of note. With considerable merits both of plan and execution the _Confessio Amantis_ has also no doubt most serious faults. The scheme itself, with its conception of a Confessor who as priest has to expound a system of morality, while as a devotee of Venus he is concerned only with the affairs of love (i. 237-280), can hardly be called altogether a consistent or happy one. The application of morality to matters of love and of love to questions of morality is often very forced, though it may sometimes be amusing in its gravity. The Confessor is continually forgetting one or the other of his two characters, and the moralist is found justifying unlawful love or the servant of Venus singing the praises of virginity. Moreover the author did not resist the temptation to express his views on society in a Prologue which is by no means sufficiently connected with the general scheme of the poem, though it is in part a protest against division and discord, that is to say, lack of love. Still worse is the deliberate departure from the general plan which we find in the seventh book, where on pretence of affording relief and recreation to the wearied penitent, the Confessor, who says that he has little or no understanding except of love, is allowed to make a digression which embraces the whole field of human knowledge, but more especially deals with the duties of a king, a second political pamphlet in fact, in which the stories of kings ruined by lust or insolence, of Sardanapalus, Rehoboam, Tarquin, and the rest, are certainly intended to some extent as an admonition of the author’s royal patron. The petition addressed to Rehoboam by his