clock, and reminding you of Wordsworth's

'Once more the ass did lengthen out
The hard dry seesaw of his horrible bray,'

you learn to dread, almost to respect, the powers of this
indefatigable man. He is the undertaker of the fair mediaeval
legend, and his style has the hateful gloss, the seemingly
unnatural length, of a coffin."

Yet hear Morley:--

"To this day we hear among our living countrymen, as was to
be heard in Gower's time and long before, the voice passing
from man to man, that in spite of admixture with the thousand
defects incident to human character, sustains the keynote of
our literature, and speaks from the soul of our history the
secret of our national success. It is the voice that
expresses the persistent instinct of the English mind to find
out what is unjust among us and undo it, to find out duty to
be done and do it, as God's bidding.... In his own Old
English or Anglo-Saxon way he tries to put his soul into his
work. Thus in the 'Vox Clamantis' we have heard him asking
that the soul of his book, not its form, be looked to; and
speaking the truest English in such sentences as that 'the
eye is blind and the ear deaf, that convey nothing down to
the heart's depth; and the heart that does not utter what it
knows is as a live coal under ashes. If I know little, there
may be another whom that little will help.... But to the man
who believes in God, no power is unattainable if he but
rightly feels his work; he ever has enough, whom God
increases.' This is the old spirit of Caedmon and of Bede; in
which are laid, while the earth lasts, the strong foundations
of our literature. It was the strength of such a temper in
him that made Gower strong. 'God knows,' he says again, 'my
wish is to be useful; that is the prayer that directs my
labor.' And while he thus touches the root of his country's
philosophy, the form of his prayer--that what he has written
may be what he would wish it to be--is still a thoroughly
sound definition of good English writing. His prayer is that
there may be no word of untruth, and that 'each word may
answer to the thing it speaks of, pleasantly and fitly; that
he may flatter in it no one, and seek in it no praise above
the praise of God.'"

The part of Gower's writing here brought