accomplices, such as the gold-making "Canon's Yeoman." Hence, again,
the vitality of such quasi-scientific fancies as the magic mirror, of
which miraculous instrument the "Squire's" "half-told story" describes
a specimen, referring to the incontestable authority of Aristotle and
others, who write "in their lives" concerning quaint mirrors and
perspective glasses, as is well known to those who have "heard the
books" of these sages. Hence, finally, the corresponding tendency to
eschew the consideration of serious religious questions, and to leave
them to clerks, as if they were crabbed problems of theology. For in
truth, while the most fertile and fertilising ideas of the Middle Ages
had exhausted, or were rapidly coming to exhaust, their influence upon
the people, the forms of the doctrines of the Church--even of the most
stimulative as well as of the most solemn among them,--had grown hard
and stiff. To those who received if not to those who taught these
doctrines they seemed alike lifeless, unless translated into the terms
of the merest earthly transactions or the language of purely human
relations. And thus, paradoxical as it might seem, cool-headed and
conscientious rulers of the Church thought themselves on occasion
called upon to restrain rather than to stimulate the religious ardour
of the multitude--fed as the flame was by very various materials.
Perhaps no more characteristic narrative has come down to us from the
age of the Poet of the "Canterbury Tales," than the story of Bishop
(afterwards Archbishop) Sudbury and the Canterbury Pilgrims. In the
year 1370 the land was agitated through its length and breadth, on the
occasion of the fourth jubilee of the national saint, Thomas the
Martyr. The pilgrims were streaming in numbers along the familiar
Kentish road, when, on the very vigil of the feast, one of their
companies was accidentally met by the Bishop of London. They demanded
his blessing; but to their astonishment and indignation he seized the
occasion to read a lesson to the crowd on the uselessness to
unrepentant sinners of the plenary indulgences, for the sake of which
they were wending their way to the Martyr's shrine. The rage of the
multitude found a mouthpiece in a soldier, who loudly upbraided the
Bishop for stirring up the people against St. Thomas, and warned him
that a shameful death would befall him in consequence. The multitude
shouted Amen--and one is left to wonder whether any of the p