revival, the work of poets familiar also with French rime
and French stanza-forms; but the poet of Piers Plowman
seems simply to resume a native inheritance never quite
forgotten by the common people. Though he has no such
artistic shaping as Cynewulf (page 50), though indeed he
lapses into monotony, false stress, and looseness of handling,
he keeps the essential character of the old verse. That, per-
haps, is why his sentences are cruder and more abrupt than
the best habit of his time; for the old verse belongs to the
period of simple parallel structure with little subordination,
one idea or image being simply added to another. In verse
and sentence-form Piers Plowman is essentially Old English.

And it is quite as English in its tone and point of view.
The zeal of the poet is a sober earnestness. His common-
sense is as strong as his sense of law and order. Faithful
son of Church and State, he pleads for reform, not for revo-
lution. By Bunyan's time, hundreds of the common people
had broken with both Church and State. For him as for
them salvation lay with the individual. But the poet of
Piers Plowman keeps the great principle of obedience. In
other respects the earlier and the later allegory are strikingly
alike, most of all in that concrete vividness and homely force
which are the salt of English literature. Both are full of
homely proverbs; both have that popular style which is the
oral habit of the preacher. Both are English in the same
ways; but Piers Plowman is also medieval. ¹

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