t of individuals by excessive
taxes,--these are the subjects of the voice crying in the wilderness.

Gower's greatest work, however, is the 'Confessio Amantis.' In form it
is a dialogue between a lover and his confessor, who is a priest of
Venus. In substance it is a setting-forth, with moralizings which are at
times touching and elevated, of one hundred and twelve different
stories, from sources so different as the Bible, Ovid, Josephus, the
'Gesta Romanorum,' Valerius Maximus, Statius, Boccaccio, etc. Thirty
thousand eight-syllabled rhymed lines make up the work. There are
different versions. The first was dedicated to Richard II., and the
second to his successor, Henry of Lancaster. Besides these large works,
a number of French ballades, and also English and Latin short poems, are
preserved. "They have real and intrinsic merit," says Todd: "they are
tender, pathetic, and poetical, and place our old poet Gower in a more
advantageous point of view than that in which he has heretofore been
usually seen."

Estimates of Gower's writings are various; but even his most hostile
judges admit the pertinence of the epithet with which Chaucer hails him
in his dedication of 'Troilus and Creseide':--

"O morall Gower, this booke I direct
To thee and to the philosophicall Strode,
To vouchsafe there need is to correct
Of your benignities and zeales good."

Then Skelton the laureate, in his long song upon the death of Philip
Sparrow (which recalls the exquisite gem of Catullus in a like
threnody), takes occasion to say:--

"Gower's englysshe is olde,
And of no value is tolde;
His matter is worth gold,
And worthy to be enrold."

And again:--

Gower that first garnished our English rude."

Old Puttenham also bears this testimony:--"But of them all [the English
poets] particularly this is myne opinion, that Chaucer, with Gower,
Lidgate, and Harding, for their antiquitie ought to have the first
place."

Taine dismisses him with little more than a fillip, and Lowell, while
discoursing appreciatively on Chaucer, says:--

"Gower has positively raised tediousness to the precision of
science; he has made dullness an heirloom for the students of
our literary history. As you slip to and fro on the frozen
levels of his verse, which give no foothold to the mind; as
your nervous ear awaits the inevitable recurrence of his
rhyme, regularly pertinacious as the tick of an eight-day