In fact, he is a poet in a different sense altogether from his predecessors, superior to former Anglo-Norman writers both in imagination and in technical skill; but at the same time he is hopelessly unreadable, so far as this book as a whole is concerned, because, having been seized by the fatal desire to do good in his generation, ‘villicacionis sue racionem, dum tempus instat, ... alleuiare cupiens,’ as he himself expresses it, he deliberately determined to smother those gifts which had been employed in the service of folly, and to become a preacher instead of a poet. Happily, as time went on, he saw reason to modify his views in this respect (as he tells us plainly in the Confessio Amantis), and he became a poet again; but meanwhile he remains a preacher, and not a very good one after all.

Quotations.—One of the characteristic features of the Mirour is the immense number of quotations. This citation of authorities is of course a characteristic of medieval morality, and appears in some books, as in the Liber Consolationis and other writings of Albertano of Brescia, in an extreme form. Here the tendency is very pronounced, especially in the part which treats of Vices and Virtues, and it is worth while to inquire what range of reading they really indicate. A very large number are from the Bible, and there can be little doubt that Gower knew the Bible, in the Vulgate version of course, thoroughly well. There is hardly a book of the Old Testament to which he does not refer, and he seems to be acquainted with Bible history even in its obscurest details. The books from which he most frequently quotes are Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ecclesiasticus, the proverbial morality of this last book[Pg lvii] being especially congenial to him. The quotations are sometimes inexact, and occasionally assigned to the wrong book; also the book of Ecclesiasticus, which is quoted very frequently, is sometimes referred to under the name of Sidrac and sometimes of Solomon: but there can be no doubt in my opinion that these Biblical quotations are at first hand. Of other writers Seneca, who is quoted by name nearly thirty times, comes easily first. Some of the references to him seem to be false, but it is possible that our author had read some of his works. Then come several of the Latin fathers, Jerome, Augustin, Gregory, Bernard, and, not far behind these, Ambrose. The quotations are not always easy to verify, and in most cases there is nothing to indicate that the books from which they are taken had been read as a whole. No doubt Gower may have been acquainted with some portions of them, as for instance that part of Jerome’s book against Jovinian which treats of the objections to marriage, but it is 

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