but on London, supporting himself by singing requiems for the dead.  “The tools I labour with ... [are] Paternoster, and my primer Placebo, and Dirige, and my Psalter, and my seven Psalms.”  References to legal terms suggest that he may have copied for lawyers.  In later life he appears to have lived in Cornwall with his wife and dau. Poor himself, he was ever a sympathiser with the poor and oppressed.  His poem appears to have been the great interest of his life, and almost to the end he was altering and adding to, without, however, improving it.  The full title of the poem is The Vision of Piers Plowman.  Three distinct versions of it exist, the first c. 1362, the second c. 1377, and the third 1393 or 1398.  It has been described as “a vision of Christ seen through the clouds of humanity.”  It is divided into nine dreams, and is in the unrhymed, alliterative, first English manner.  In the allegory appear such personifications as Meed (worldly success), Falsehood, Repentance, Hope, etc.  Piers Plowman, first introduced as the type of the poor and simple, becomes gradually transformed into the Christ.  Further on appear Do-well, Do-bet, Do-best.  In this poem, and its additions, L. was able to express all that he had to say of the abuses of the time, and their remedy.  He himself stands out as a sad, earnest, and clear-sighted onlooker in a time of oppression and unrest.  It is thought that he may have been the author of a poem, Richard the Redeless:  if so he was, at the time of writing, living in Bristol, and making a last remonstrance to the misguided King, news of whose death may have reached him while at the work, as it stops in the middle of a paragraph.  He is not much of an artist, being intent rather on delivering his message than that it should be in a perfect dress.  Prof.  Manley, in the Cambridge History of English Literature, advances the theory that The Vision is not the work of one, but of several writers, W.L. being therefore a dramatic, not a personal name.  It is supported on such grounds as differences in metre, diction, sentence structure, and the diversity of view on social and ecclesiastic matters expressed in different parts of the poem.

LANIER, SIDNEY (1842-1881).—­Miscellaneous writer, s. of a lawyer of Huguenot descent, was b. at Macon, Georgia.  He had a varied career, having been successively soldier, shopman, teacher, lawyer, musician, and prof.  His first literary venture was a novel, Tiger Lilies (1867).  Thereafter he wrote mainly on literature, his works including The Science of English Verse (1881), The English Novel (1883), and Shakespeare and his Forerunners (1902); also some poems which have been greatly admired, including “Corn,” “The Marshes of Glynn,” and “The Song of the Chattahoochee”; ed. of Froissart, and the Welsh Mabinogion for children.  He worked under the shadow of serious lung trouble, which eventually brought about his death.