h al to noht."

We do not know the names of any of these singers, but they were worthy
forerunners of the later lyrists of love and nature.

Robert Manning of Brunne.--We have now come to fourteenth-century
literature, which begins to wear a more modern aspect. Robert Manning,
generally known as Robert of Brunne, because he was born at Brunne,
now called Bourn, in Lincolnshire, adapted from a Norman-French
original a work entitled _Handlyng Synne_ (_Manual of Sins_). This
book, written in the Midland dialect in 1303, discourses of the Seven
Deadly Sins and the best ways of living a godly life.

A careful inspection of the following selection from the _Handlyng
Synne_ will show that, aside from the spelling, the English is
essentially modern. Most persons will be able to understand all but a
few words. He was the first prominent English writer to use the modern
order of words. The end rime is also modern. A beggar, seeing a beast
laden with bread at the house of a rich man, asks for food. The poem
says of the rich man:--

"He stouped down to seke a stone,
But, as hap was, than fonde he none.
For the stone he toke a lofe,
And at the pore man hyt drofe.
The pore man hente hyt up belyue,
And was thereof ful ferly blythe,
To hys felaws fast he ran
With the lofe, thys pore man."

He stooped down to seek a stone,
But, as chance was, then found he none.
For the stone he took a loaf,
And at the poor man it drove.
The poor man caught it up quickly,
And was thereof full strangely glad,
To his fellows fast he ran
With the loaf this poor man.

Oliphant says: "Strange it is that Dante should have been compiling
his _Inferno_, which settled the course of Italian literature forever,
in the selfsame years that Robert of Brunne was compiling the earliest
pattern of well-formed New English... Almost every one of the Teutonic
changes in idiom, distinguishing the New English from the Old, the
speech of Queen Victoria from the speech of Hengist, is to be found in
Manning's work."

Mandeville's Travels.--Sir John Mandeville, who is popularly
considered the author of a very entertaining work of travels, states
that he was born in St. Albans in 1300, that he left England in 1322,
and traveled in the East for thirty-four years. His _Travels_ relates
what he saw and heard in his wanderings through Ethiopia, Persia,
Tartary, India, and Cathay. What he tells on his own authority, he
vouches for as tru