and the poor priests, his followers, upon whom the con-
servatives of the age fastened the contemptuous name of
"Lollers," were not to find their true counterpart until
the followers of John Wesley went about England preach-
ing another reformation, four centuries nearer to the
modern age.

These are but the most striking manifestations of a new
spirit and of new ideas at work upon English society in
this remarkable age. In less conspicuous ways, as well,
the same tendencies toward change are made evident. The
literature of the times is so pervaded with a questioning
spirit as to make this a great age of satire. Of the four
greatest English writers of the century, one was a re-
ligious reformer, whose writings attacked nearly every
institution of the mediæval church, from the corrupt
priesthood to the papacy itself. Another gave himself so
completely to the exposure of the corruption of mediæval
institutions that the most radical agitators of the age used
his Peter the Ploughman as symbol of their revolutionary
ideals. A third, though his spirit was clearly made for
the most tranquil waters of literature, was so stirred by
his disgust at things which he had witnessed that he, too,
wrote many pages of vituperative satire. As for Chaucer
himself, his work contains satirical passages so startling
in their approach to our own point of view toward the
decaying institutions of the Middle Ages that they have
won him the doubtful compliment of being called "mod-
ern."

This satirical spirit in the poets seems to have been but
a reflection of a way of thinking by no means limited to
men of letters. That men and women were thinking for
themselves at all, and that their thoughts so frequently

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