been indulging his sense of humour in making Gower one of the correctors of his version of that—

[Pg xiii]

which the moralist had thought only good enough for the indolent worshipper to dream of in church (Mir. 5253), yet the dedication must have been in part at least due to respect for the literary taste of the persons addressed.

If however we must on the whole pronounce the literary value of the Speculum Meditantis to be small, the case is quite different with regard to the Balades, that is to say, the collection of about fifty love-poems which is found in the Trentham manuscript. These will be discussed in detail later, and reasons will be given for assigning them to the later rather than to the earlier years of the poet’s life. Here it is enough to say that they are for the most part remarkably good, better indeed than anything of their kind which was produced in England at that period, and superior in my opinion to the balades of Granson, ‘flour of hem that make in France,’ some of which Chaucer translated. But for the accident that they were written in French, this series of balades would have taken a very distinct place in the history of English literature.

The period to which the Speculum Meditantis belongs, about the beginning of the last quarter of the fourteenth century, is that in which the fusion of French and English elements from which the later language grew may be said to have been finally accomplished. Thanks to the careful work of English and German philologists in recent years, the process by which French words passed into the English language in the period from the beginning of the thirteenth to the end of the fourteenth century has been sufficiently traced, so far as regards the actual facts of their occurrence in English texts. Perhaps however the real nature of the process has not been set forth with sufficient clearness. It is true that before the end of the reign of Edward III the French element may be said to have been almost fully introduced into the vocabulary; the materials lay ready for those writers, the Wycliffite translators of the Bible, Chaucer, and Gower himself, who were to give the stamp of their authority to the language which was to be the literary language of England. Nevertheless, French words were still French for these writers,[Pg xiv] and not yet English; the fact that the two languages were still used side by side, and that to every Englishman of literary culture the form of French which existed in England was as a second mother tongue, long preserved a French citizenship for the borrowed words. In the earlier part 

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