introduced into the text of the poem, while at the same time the personal reference to the king in the Prologue was suppressed. If the date referred to above had been observed by former editors, the speculations first of Pauli and then of Professor Hales, tending to throw back the completion of the first recension of the Confessio Amantis to the year 1386, or even 1383, would have been spared. Their conclusions rest, moreover, on the purest guess-work. The former argues that the preface and the epilogueF in their first form date from the year 1386, because from that year the king (who was then nineteen years old) ‘developed those dangerous qualities which estranged from him, amongst others, the poet’; and Professor Hales (Athenæum, Dec. 1881) contends that the references to the young king’s qualities as a ruler, ‘Justice medled with pite,’ &c. certainly point to the years immediately succeeding the Peasants’ revolt (a time when Gower did not regard him as a responsible ruler at all, but excuses him for the evil proceedings of the government on account of his tender age)G,[Pg xxii] that the reference to Richard’s desire to establish peace (viii. 3014* ff.) must belong to the period of the negotiations with the French and the subsequent truce, 1383-84, though Professor Hales is himself quite aware that negotiations for peace were proceeding also in 1389, and finally that the mention of ‘the newe guise of Beawme’ must indicate the very year succeeding the king’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia in 1382, whereas in fact the Bohemian fashions would no doubt continue to prevail at court, and still be accounted new, throughout the queen’s lifetime. It is on such grounds as these that we are told that the Confessio Amantis in its first form cannot have been written later than the year 1385 and was probably as early as 1383.

Date and Circumstances.

[Pg xxii]

All such conjectures are destroyed by the fact that the manuscripts of the first recension bear the date 1390 at the place cited, and though this does not absolutely exclude a later date for the completion of the book, it is decisive against an earlier one. Moreover, the fact that in the final recension this date is omitted (and deliberately omitted, as we know from the erasure in the Fairfax MS.) points to the conclusion that it is to be regarded definitely as a date of publication, and therefore was inappropriate for a later edition.

This conclusion agrees entirely with the other indications, and they are sufficiently precise, though the fact that one of these also has unluckily escaped the notice of the editors has 

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