whose gay and festive pictures is heightened by contrast with the somber background on which they are drawn.

The Black Death, which made the tour of Europe in 1349-51, is undoubtedly the same disease as the Plague, now, or till quite lately, endemic on the shores of the Levant and in Egypt, having been, as it were, domesticated there by the lazy, filthy, and fatalistic habits of the people. Its specific causes are as much unknown as its original seat. The opinion of the time and some modern authorities agree in connecting its appearance with contemporary physical phenomena of a very remarkable kind; but it would seem as if these phenomena must have been of too limited and local a character to account for a pestilence which spread over a whole continent. Parching droughts, as it is said, were succeeded by convulsions of the earth and crackings of its surface, from which a fetid and poisonous vapor was projected into the atmosphere, the corruption of which was afterward. increased by malarious exhalations from swamps caused by incessant deluges of rain. To the panic-struck imagination of the people the Black Death seemed to be advancing to their destruction in the palpable form of a "thick, stinking mist."

In some rare and frightful cases of seizure the victims fell down and died without premonitory symptoms, but in the majority of instances the attack began with shiverings and bristling of the hair, succeeded by burning internal fever with a cold skin, and the rapid formation of boils, first in the axillae and the groin, and afterward in the internal organs. The appearance of these boils was the most characteristic of all the symptoms of the Black Death, but the advance of dissolution was often so rapid as to outstrip these forerunners, which were, indeed, due to a strong effort of nature to expel the matter of the disease from the blood.

The terror of the Plague was every-where, inviting death; men's vital powers were so depressed by anticipation that they

were already half-dead before they were attacked; the throat parched, the pulse quickened, by nervous anxiety, were taken for the fatal symptoms of seizure. And next to the fear of death was that of previous desertion. Men and women feared to look in each other's faces lest they should be betrayed by the "muddy glistening" of the eye, or detected in feeling with feverish finger for "the little hard kernel, no bigger than a pea, which moved with the touch under the skin of the armpit," the sure precursor, as it was thought, of doom inevitable, irremediable, inexorable, and irrespective of persons, ages, or conditions of life. To imaginations morbid with terror pestilence indeed seemed to lurk in every thing-in every morsel eaten, in every rag that fluttered in the wind. But who would be so fool-hardy and irrational as to "throw good life after bad," by nursing a dying friend, when Black Death was in the breathing of his last sigh or the farewell pressure of his hand? So the nearest and dearest ties were dissolved, the calls of kindred and humanity neglected, and the sick were left to die and then be carted to the grave by hirelings. Numbers were driven, by an unreasoning terror, away from human habitations, and perished miserably in the solitude of the fields.

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In England, however, by far the most memorable results of the Black Death were its social and economical effects. It made its appearance in Dorsetshire, in the month of August of the fatal year 1348, but it was three months before it had reached London. Knyghton, who lived at the time, says that many villages and hamlets were desolated, without a house being left in them, all those who dwelt in them being dead." The country places which the Plague attacked were soon silenced, for the pestilence did not even spare the brute creation; and the carcasses of sheep, horses, and oxen lay putrefying in the fields, untouched by dogs or birds of prey. But in London the streets and public places were, for a time at least, all alive and brisk with funerals-" alive with death."

First single biers, and then cart-loads of corpses hurried along to the grave-yards: no time was to be lost, for there would soon be too few left living to bury the dead.

It is said on contemporary authority--and the statement is confirmed by modern research-that no less than one-half of the population perished. The immediate consequence was an enormous increase in the value of labor, and a corresponding depreciation in the value of land. In the winter which followed the Plague "flocks and herds wandered about the fields and corn without any that could drive them." Landlords excused their tenants' rents for one, two, or three years, lest they should desert their holdings, and leave them uncultivated on their owners' hands. Wages were so high as to swallow up the farmer's profit, and it frequently became a question whether it would be more ruinous to leave the crops ungathered or to comply with the extravagant demands of the laborers.

XXIV.

JOHN WYCLIF.-SHIRLEY.

[The career of Wyclif, as a reformer, included the later years of Edward III., and the earlier years of his grandson and immediate successor, Richard II. He attacked both the discipline and doctrine of the Church of his time, and in many points anticipated the great Reformation of the sixteenth century. When he first rose into prominence the papal court was at Avignon, in France. A few years later occurred what is known as the Great Schism. Two popes were elected, one at Rome and the other at Avignon, and Europe was divided between them. The schism caused great scandal and corruption, and did much to destroy the influence of the рарасу. In England the French pope was regarded as an enemy; hence, to a large extent, the popular sympathy for Wyclif.]

Of all external events perhaps the great schism of the West exercised the most important influence on the career of the reformer; it strengthened his theological, but it under

mined his political, position. He may not have been aware, certainly John of Gaunt, if we may judge by his acts, was not aware, how large a portion of the antipathy of Englishmen to the papal court was due to its residence at Avignon. The pope was, to Englishmen of the time of Edward III., the obedient slave of France, through whose coffers the treasure of this country passed to feed the war against herself, whose partisans, especially among the mendicant friars, were perpetually engaged in fostering an unpatriotic, unna- • tional feeling, and who appeared, an advocate in the garb of mediator, to throw the weight of his influence in every negotiation into the scale of the enemies of England.

With the great schism all this was changed. Not only did the common feeling of reverence for the head of the Church naturally return when the causes which had for a time destroyed it were removed, but the nation must have witnessed, with novel delight, the "king's adversary of France" falling under the ban of the papacy. The violence of the Lancastrian government, and its mad defiance of popular feeling, hastened the reaction, and thus before long Wyclif, sanguine as he was, had probably abandoned all serious hope of any practical reform of the Church.

From this time the theological element, in our modern and narrower sense of the word, becomes predominant in his works; he begins to write English tracts, to speak of the translation of the Bible, which was probably in progress at this time, and lastly, arriving at a conclusion to which he had long been tending, he put out, in the spring of 1381, a paper containing twelve propositions, in which he denied the doctrine of transubstantiation.

It was on these propositions that his prosecution by the archbishop was framed-a prosecution which, unlike that of four years before, was really theological, not political, in its object. Whatever share old party feeling may have had in stirring Courtney's theological zeal, no archbishop of Canterbury,

even if inclined, could safely have neglected to proceed against the author of opinions so profoundly at variance with the ecclesiastical, even more than with the theological, principles of the day.

Yet the first attack on the new doctrine was not made by him. Almost immediately after its appearance it was condemned by the chancellor of the university and a select meeting of doctors. Wyclif appealed to John of Gaunt, who came down to Oxford, and, caring little to be embroiled in a theological dispute, confirmed the sentence of the chancellor by an injunction to the reformer not to speak further on the subject of the eucharist. A political partisan would have been silenced: Wyclif replied by his memorable confession. Help came to him from a quarter whence, perhaps, it was little expected.

The popular cry of heresy, then as ever, was far less telling within the university than in the country at large. The theological alarms of John of Gaunt were little felt by the masters of arts. Their common enmity to the religious, and especially to the mendicant, orders, attached the secular clergy of Oxford, as a body, to the cause of Wyclif. They did not forget that three years before the monks, in gratifying their animosity against him, had sacrificed the independent pride of the university, and they could not but foresee, in the new prosecutions which were preparing, fresh sources of humiliation for her. This feeling, re-enforcing the strength of Wyclif's own party, told in the university elections. In the annual change of officers, the incoming chancellor and proctors were all more or less inclined to his cause, and the university troubled him no more

Thus checked, the leaders of the movement turned to the archbishop, and, in consequence of their representations, in May, 1382, a provincial council was assembled at the Black Friars, in London.

The form of the proceedings was remarkable. Wyclif