offensive, as such descriptions almost always are. Her lover suspects that her soul may be in a perilous state, seeing that she has the power of saving a man’s life and yet suffers him to die, but he admits there is no more violence in her than in a child of three years old, and her words are as pleasant to him as the winds of the South. Usurious dealing is a vice of which he ventures to accuse her, seeing that he has given her his whole heart in return for a single glance of her eye, and she holds to the bargain and will not give heart for heart; but then, as the Confessor very justly replies, ‘she may be such that her one glance is worth thy whole heart many times over,’ and so he has sold his heart profitably, having in return much more than it is worth.

[Pg xvi]

However, the literary characteristic which is perhaps most remarkable in the Confessio Amantis is connected rather with the form of expression than with the subject-matter. No justice is done to Gower unless it is acknowledged that the technical skill which he displays in his verse and the command which he has over the language for his own purposes is very remarkable. In the ease and naturalness of his movement within the fetters of the octosyllabic couplet he far surpasses his contemporaries, including Chaucer himself. Certain inversions of order and irregularities of construction he allows himself, and there are many stop-gaps of the conventional kind in the ordinary flow of his narrative; but in places where the matter requires it, his admirable management of the verse paragraph, the metrical smoothness of his lines, attained without unnatural accent or forced order of words, and the neatness with which he expresses exactly what he has to say within the precise limits which he lays down for himself, show a finished mastery of expression which[Pg xvii] is surprising in that age of half-developed English style, and in a man who had trained himself rather in French and Latin than in English composition. Such a sentence as the following, for example, seems to flow from him with perfect ease, there is no halting in the metre, no hesitation or inversion for the sake of the rhyme, it expresses just what it has to express, no more and no less:

[Pg xvii]

Or again, as an example of a more colloquial kind,

There is nothing remarkable about the sentiment or expression in these passages, but they are perfectly simple and natural, and run into rhyming verse without disturbance of sense or accent; but such technical skill as we have here is extremely rare among the 

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