—­He look’d around, and saw the world he left
When to that visionary realm of song
His spirit fled from bonds of flesh bereft;
And on the vision he lay musing long,
As o’er his soul rude minstrel-echoes throng,
Old measures half-disused; and grasp’d his pen,
And drew his cottage-Christ for homely men.

Thus Langland also took his pilgrimage;
Rough lone knight-errant on uncourtly ways,
And wrong and woe were charter’d on his page,
With some horizon-glimpse of sweeter days. 
And on the land the message of his lays
Smote like the strong North-wind, and cleansed the sky
With wholesome blast and bitter clarion-cry,

Summoning the people in the Ploughman’s name. 
—­So fought his fight, and pass’d unknown away;
Seeking no other praise, no sculptured fame
Nor laureate honours for his artless lay,
Nor in the Minster laid with high array;—­
But where the May-thorn gleams, the grasses wave,
And the wind sighs o’er a forgotten grave.

Langland, whom I have put here in contrast with Chaucer, is said to have lived between 1332 and 1400.  His Vision of Piers the Plowman (who is partially identified with our blessed Saviour), with some added poems, forms an allegory on life in England, in Church and State, as it appeared to him during the dislocated and corrupt age which followed the superficial glories of Edward the Third’s earlier years.

Took the toll; Amongst other official employments, Chaucer was Comptroller of the Customs in the Port of London.  See his House of Fame; and the beautiful picture of his walks at dawning in the daisy-meadows:  Prologue to the Legend of Good Women.

His of Certaldo, . . . in Scythia; Boccaccio:—­and Ovid, who died in exile at Tomi:—­to both of whom Chaucer is greatly indebted for the substance of his tales.

Picture-like; ’It is chiefly as a comic poet, and a minute observer of manners and circumstances, that Chaucer excels.  In serious and moral poetry he is frequently languid and diffuse, but he springs like Antaeus from the earth when his subject changes to coarse satire or merry narrative’ (Hallam, Mid.  Ages:  Ch.  IX:  Pt. iii).

The Tabard; Inn in Southwark whence the pilgrims to Canterbury start.

Down the Strand; It is thus that Langland describes himself and his feelings of dissatisfaction with the world.

That worst woe; Literature, even ancient literature, has no phrase more deeply felt and pathetic than the words which the Persian nobleman at the feast in Thebes before Plataea addressed to Thersander of Orchomenus:—­[Greek text]:  (Herodotus, IX:  xvi).

One morn he lay; The Vision opens with a picture of the poet asleep on Malvern Hill:  the last of the added poems closing as he wakes with the Easter chimes.

Old measures; Langland’s metre ’is more uncouth than that of his predecessors’ (Hallam, Mid.  Ag.  Ch.  IX:  Pt. iii).