animated with a lively and luxurious
imagination; pointed with a variety of pungent satire; and dignified
with many excellent lessons of morality; but as to the conduct of
the whole, it does not appear to be of a piece; every vision seems a
distinct rhapsody, and does not carry on either one single action or
a series of many; but we ought rather to wonder at its beauties than
cavil at its defects; and if the poetical design is broken, the
moral is entire, which, is uniformly the advancement of piety, and
reformation of the Roman clergy. The piece before us is entitled the
Vision of Piers the Plowman, and I shall quote that particular part
which seems to have furnished a hint to Milton in his Paradise Lost,
b. 2. 1. 475.

Kinde Conscience tho' heard, and came out of
the planets,
And sent forth his sorrioues, fevers, and fluxes,
Coughes, and cardicales, crampes and toothaches,
Reums, and ragondes, and raynous scalles,
Byles, and blothes, and burning agues,
Freneses, and foul euyl, foragers of kinde!
* * * * *
There was harrow! and help! here cometh Kinde
With death that's dreadful, to undone us all
Age the hoore, he was in vaw-ward
And bare the baner before death, by right he it
claymed!
Kinde came after, with many kene foxes,
As pockes, and pestilences, and much purple
shent;
So Kinde, through corruptions killed full many:
Death came driving after, and all to dust pashed
Kyngs and bagaars, knights and popes.

* * * * *
MILTON.

----------Immediately a place
Before his eyes appear'd, sad, noisom, dark,
A lazar-house it seem'd; wherein were laid

Numbers of all diseased: all maladies
Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms
Of heartsick agony, all fev'rous kinds,
Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs,
Intestine stone and ulcer, cholic-pangs
Demoniac phrenzy, moping melancholy
And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy,
Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence,
Dropsies and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums;
Dire was the tossing! deep the groans! despair
Tended the sick, busiest from couch to couch:
And over them, triumphant death his dart
Shook. P. L. b. xi. 1. 477.

* * * * *

Sir JOHN GOWER

Flourished in the reign of Edward III, and Richard II. He was
cotemporary with Chaucer and much esteemed and honoured by him, as
appears by his s