outside the walls of the city of Canterbury."[13] The revelations show that she was (or had been) a woman of some wealth and social position, who had abandoned the world to become an ancress, following the life prescribed in that gem of early English devotional literature, the Ancren Riwle.14 It is clearly only a fragment of her complete book (whatever that may have been); but it is enough to show that she was a worthy precursor of that other great woman mystic of East Anglia:  Juliana of Norwich.  For Margery, as for Juliana, Love is the interpretation of revelation, and the key to the universal mystery:[15]—­

“Daughter, thou mayst no better please God, than to think continually in His love.”

“If thou wear the habergeon or the hair, fasting bread and water, and if thou saidest every day a thousand Pater Nosters, thou shalt not please Me so well as thou dost when thou art in silence, and suffrest Me to speak in thy soul.”

“Daughter, if thou knew how sweet thy love is to Me, thou wouldest never do other thing but love Me with all thine heart.”

“In nothing that thou dost or sayest, daughter, thou mayst no better please God than believe that He loveth thee.  For, if it were possible that I might weep with thee, I would weep with thee for the compassion that I have of thee.”

And, from the midst of her celestial contemplations, rises up the simple, poignant cry of human suffering:  “Lord, for Thy great pain have mercy on my little pain.”

We are on surer ground with the treatise that follows, the Song of Angels.16 Walter Hilton—­who died on March 24, 1396—­holds a position in the religious life and spiritual literature of England in the latter part of the fourteenth century somewhat similar to that occupied by Richard Rolle in its earlier years.  Like the Hermit of Hampole, he was the founder of a school, and the works of his followers cannot always be distinguished with certainty from his own.  Like his great master in the mystical way, Richard of St. Victor, Hilton was an Augustinian, the head of a house of canons at Thurgarton, near Newark.  His great work, the Scala Perfectionis, or Ladder of Perfection, “which expoundeth many notable doctrines in Contemplation,” was first printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1494, and is still widely used for devotional reading.  A shorter treatise, the Epistle to a Devout Man in Temporal Estate, first printed by Pynson in 1506, gives practical guidance to a religious layman of wealth and social position, for the fulfilling of the duties of his state without hindrance to his making profit in the spiritual life.  These, with the Song of Angels, are the only printed works that can be assigned to him with certainty, though many others, undoubtedly from his pen, are to be found in manuscripts, and a complete and critical edition of Walter Hilton seems still in the far future.[17] The Song of Angels has been twice printed since the edition of Pepwell.[18] In profoundly mystical language, tinged with the philosophy of that mysterious Neo-Platonist whom we call the pseudo-Dionysius, it tells of the wonderful “onehead,” the union of the soul with God in perfect charity:—­