Finally, our author’s popularity and established position as a story-teller is decisively vouched for by the partly Shakesperian play of _Pericles_. Plots of plays were usually borrowed without acknowledgement; but here, a plot being taken from the _Confessio Amantis_, the opportunity is seized of bringing Gower himself on the stage to act as Prologue to four out of the five acts, speaking in the measure of his own octosyllabic couplet, ‘To sing a song that old was sung From ashes ancient Gower is come,’ &c. The book was so well known and the author so well established in reputation, that a play evidently gained credit by connecting itself with his name. The following are the principal references to Gower in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The author of _The King’s Quair_ dedicates his poem to the memory (or rather to the poems) of his masters Gower and Chaucer. Hoccleve calls him ‘my maister Gower,’ ‘Whos vertu I am insufficient For to descrive.’ John Walton of Osney, the metrical translator of Boethius, writes, ‘To Chaucer, that is flour of rhethorique In english tonge and excellent poete, This wot I wel, no thing may I do like, Though so that I of makinge entermete; And Gower, that so craftely doth trete As in his book<es> of moralite, Though I to hem in makinge am unmete, Yit moste I schewe it forth that is in me.’ Bokenham in his _Lives of the Saints_ repeatedly speaks of Gower, Chaucer and Lydgate, the last of whom was then still living, as the three great lights of English literature. Caxton printed the _Confessio Amantis_ in 1483, and it seems to have been one of the most popular productions of his press. In the sixteenth century Gower appears by the side of Chaucer in Dunbar’s _Lament for the Makaris_ and in Lindsay’s poems. Hawes in the _Pastime of Pleasure_ classes him with Chaucer and his beloved Lydgate, and Skelton introduces him as first in order of time among the English poets who are mentioned in the _Garland of Laurel_, ‘I saw Gower that first garnysshed our Englysshe rude, And maister Chaucer,’ &c., a testimony which is not quite consistent with that in the _Lament for Philip Sparow_, ‘Gower’s Englysh is old And of no value is told, His mater is worth gold And worthy to be enrold.’ Barclay in the Preface of his _Mirour of Good Manners_ (printed 1516) states that he has been desired by his ‘Master,’ Sir Giles Alington, to abridge and amend the _Confessio Amantis_, but has declined the task, chiefly on moral grounds. The work he says would not be suitable to his age and order (he was a priest and monk of Ely),