hermit Rolle de Hampole, in the fourteenth century. It is short and little known: "A scolere at Pares had done many full synnys the whylke he had schame to schryfe hym of. At the last gret sorowe of herte ouercome his schame, & when he was redy to schryfe till (to) the priore of the abbay of Saynte Victor, swa mekill contricione was in his herte, syghynge in his breste, sobbynge in his throtte, that he moghte noghte brynge a worde furthe. Thane the prioure said till hym: Gaa & wrytte thy synnes. He dyd swa, & come a-gayne to the prioure and gafe hym that he hade wretyn, ffor yitt he myghte noghte schryfe hym with mouthe. The prioure saghe the synnys swa grette that thurghe leve of the scolere he schewede theyme to the abbotte to hafe conceyle. The abbotte tuke that byll that ware wrettyn in & lukede thare one. He fande na thynge wretyn & sayd to the priour: What may here be redde thare noghte es wretyne? That saghe the priour & wondyrd gretly & saide: Wyet ye that his synns here warre wretyn & I redde thaym, bot now I see that God has sene hys contrycyone & forgyfes hym all his synnes. This the abbot & the prioure tolde the scolere, & he, with gret joy thanked God."[14] But instances of this kind of story lack those features of gaiety and satirical observation of which French stories are full, and which are an important element of the novel. Some are mystical; others, in which the devil figures on whom the saints play rude tricks, are intended to raise a loud laugh; in both cases real life is equally distant. A keen faculty of observation however existed in the nation; foibles of human nature did not escape the English writer's eye any more than its higher aspirations. This is illustrated not only by Chaucer, who chose to write poetry, but by such men as Nigel Wireker[15] and Walter Map who chose to write Latin.[16] But not one English author before the Renaissance employed such gifts in writing prose studies of real life in his native tongue. Owing to the Conquest a certain discredit seemed to rest for generations on England's original language. Long after an English nation, rich in every sort of glory had come into being, writers are to be found hesitating to use the national idiom. This circumstance is chiefly noticeable in prose where the use of a foreign tongue offers less difficulties than in poetry. Prose was less cultivated in England even so late as the commencement of the sixteenth century than in France during the thirteenth. At the time of the Renaissance, Sir Thomas More, the wittiest Englishman of his day, whose English style was admirable and who moreover loved the language of his native land, wishing to publish a romance of social satire, the "Utopia,"[17] wrote it in Latin. It is one of the oldest examples in modern literature of that species of book which includes at a later date the story of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Bacon's "New Atlantis," Cyrano de Bergerac's "Etats et