the angels when they come may say, 'The grace of God be on this bibber!'"* But from this point the strain lightens ; Golias sings his scorn of certain poets who write fasting, avoid the wine-cup and the scene of strife. His own verses he makes with a full belly. It is wine that loosens his tongue with eloquence. It is when Bacchus sits in the citadel of his brain that Apollo enters and works miracles. This part of the poem might be taken as a drinking-song ; but the writer, let it be remembered, is himself the temperate poet whom he makes the toping bishop scorn. The levity of Golias appears in two or three changes of humour before the short confession ends. When he has vomited up his old life to the Bishop of Coventry, who confesses him, he tells his confessor that he is displeased with it, and would like to try new ways. Already he loves virtues, and is wrathful against vice; his mind is renewed, his spirit born again; he is as a babe feeding on milk, that his heart may be no more a vessel for vanity; and so he ends by asking for pardon, and promising to perform any imposed penance. The greater part of the Golias poetry printed by Thomas Wright in the same volume with that of Walter Map, simply connects the popular name with the religious purpose for which it was first invented. Golias, in these imitations, seldom speaks in character; and he sometimes preaches devoutly to back-sliding priests. But we may yet perhaps recover more of the poems by which Map applied his genius to the creation of an episcopal Falstaff, who became a person as well known in England as the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. I do not doubt that the witty verses of Golias "against marrying a wife" are * "Meum est propositum in taberna mori: Map's other Poems. rightly ascribed to Walter Map; and that he wrote the rhymed epitome of Wales, which sums up in four hundred short lines the land of his thrifty countrymen, content with barley and rye-bread-and cheese, of course; the seese and putter of Sir Hugh Evans, whereof Map also sings, His pre-eminence as a colloquial wit, the rough humour of his time, and the character of the court in which he was popular, left few men leisure to observe how little there was of idle speaking in Map's light use of his talent. He dealt with men as they were. Saying to no man, I am holier than thou; gaily audacious, he shot at hypocrisy over the dinnertable, and could strike home at avarice with a light turn of wit, when the king sent for him to give shrewd counsel. He was not, in life, eternally didactic; and when he taught best, none might seem to be less a teacher. Yet no celled monk, keeping a trade-account of penances with heaven, was more mindful than this genial archdeacon of the Master to whose service he was formally devoted. If Walter Map had been a man to wear his soul upon his sleeve, the Cistercian abbot who came to his sick-bed perhaps would not have bidden him repent of having been a wit. For his aim was not more pure when he set the holy Graal among King Arthur's knights, and placed in the seat perilous, at their table, Sir Galahad for their true pattern, than when he gave a seat on the Bench of Bishops to Golias, of whose life it was the crowning hope that he might die drunk in a tavern. CHAPTER VII. NIGEL WIREKER-MORE CHRONICLERS--NECKHAM AND GERVASE OF TILBURY. COURT chaplains and the clergy who mixed with the world. were not the only satirists of the degeneracy of the monks. Within the monastery itself the English mind was Monks. Satire within the Monas Degeneraat work, heartily in earnest, struggling to get at a tion of the religion free from hypocrisy, and at a learning without pedantry. The reckless traders in a sacred trust were deaf to ordinary exhortation; but the bustle of the world, and greater interest of educated men in secular affairs, had opened new channels for wit. It had made chroniclers of the priests; and now we find their meditations on events of their own time taking a vigorous form of satire. Their battle was with a false spirit of mockery, that could parry with a laugh every argument save only that which turned the laugh against itself. And let us remember here, that if the reckless Norman gaiety went far towards demoralisation of the monasteries, its blood alliance with the Saxon earnestness bred the new forms of lively vigour in attack on their misdoings. Map, at least half belonging to the Cymry, owed to Celtic blood some of his wit. But Wireker, whose liveliness is of the Saxon sort, seems to have been brightened only by attrition with the Normans, at home and in Paris. tery Nigel Wireker was a liberal churchman, precentor in the Benedictine monastery at Canterbury, and a friend of Nigel Wireker. William de Longchamp, to whom he addressed a prose treatise on the Corruptions of the Church, and to whom also, before Longchamp was Bishop of Ely, if not to some other friend William, he dedicated his famous satirical poem of "Brunellus; or, the Mirror of Fools ("Speculum Stultorum "). The minor writings of Nigel Wireker are attacks upon self-seeking hypocrisy among those who make religion their profession. His apologue of "Brunellus," in about 3,800 Latin elegiac lines, is named after its hero, an ass who had a monkish discontent with the length of his tail, and went the round of the monastic orders. Wireker's "Brunellus." The name of the ass, Brunellus--a diminutive of Brown-is taken from the scholastic logic of the day. It was first applied to a horse when a particular horse had to be discussed, in place of the general idea, horse. Half-a-dozen illustrations of this are quoted in an essay on Nigel Wireker, produced by Immanuel Weber, Bachelor of Philosophy, for public disputation in the University of Leipsic in the year 1679.* From one old disputant he extracts the sentence, "Without this horse (demonstrated Brunellus) riding is impossible; ergo, this horse is not required for riding." Another colour from which the logician took a name to represent any particular horse was Favellus. But when it came to be felt that Bucephalus was a finer word to stand for an individual horse, Brunellus and Favellus were turned over to the asses. Thus writes Johannes Major, a Scot of Haddington, in his De Ascensu et Descensu," ""Grant that there are two men, say Socrates and Plato, of which each has an ass; precisely, Socrates Brunellus, Plato Favellus," etc. 66 Taking, then, the name of the schoolmen for their own particular ass, Nigel Wireker represented to the public that *"C. D. de Nigello Wirekero ... sub præsidio Dn. M. Jacob Thomasii publice disputabit Weber. Lipsia, 1679." Immanuel Brunellus found his tail too short, and went to consult the physician Galen on the subject. The author of the satire explains openly in his preface that "the ass is that monk who, not content with his own condition, wants to have his old tail pulled off, and try by all means to get a new and longer tail to grow in its place—that is to say by attaching to himself priories and abbeys." He calls his book, as he says in this introductory letter to his friend William, "The Mirror of Fools," that they who see themselves in it may learn to correct their faults. Galen, finding the case of Brunellus frivolous, advises him to be content, and tells him the story of two cows, Bicornis and Brunetta, who lay down to sleep one winter evening in a muddy place, and after a night of frost, woke in the morning to find their tails so hard bound in the earth that they could not pull them out. One of the cows got her tail off, and went home to the good victual in the stable, bidding her neighbour get rid of her tail too, and make haste to her breakfast. But the other, who was wiser, waited till the noonday sun unbound the earth and set her free to go home with her tail behind her. Those cows, says Nigel in his preface, are two kinds of monks; one eager only to fatten a kind of monks who will tear away from themselves that which is essential, that which in in the day of fervent heat, the judgment day, shall sweep away the stinging flies of hell. But as Brunellus is resolved on having a new tail, Galen sends him off with a satirical prescription, of which he is to bring back the ingredients in glass bottles. The ass who goes on this errand is the monk who runs hither and thither in pursuit of vanities, and when got they are held, by tenure of flattery or otherwise, in glass bottles as costly as they are frail. He is cheated by a merchant; and on his return has his tail partly bitten off by four large mastiffs, set on him by the Cistercian Brother Fomundus, with a "Benedictus, ha, ha!" The Cistercian, being terrified by the wrath of Brunellus, dissembles, and M-VOL. III. |