With a false form of holy life,
O’er all the wide world they are rife,
False friars, &c.
Yet, notwithstanding the freedom with which the bard ridicules the immoral lives of the clergy, and the irreverence with which he occasionally treats even the rites of the church, I do not conceive that we are warranted in ascribing to him views of Christianity more enlightened than were generally entertained by the more intelligent part of his contemporaries. The fourteenth century, though signalized by the birth of Wicliffe,—whose doctrines were looked upon with no unfavourable eye by the bulk of the English nation,—was not an age in which many instances are recorded of a positive rejection of the doctrines, and a formal departure from the communion of the church of Rome. This period is remarkable rather as the era of the first awakening of the human mind, which exhibited itself in a certain vague hostility to the pretensions of the Romish see, rather than in any clear and consistent objections to its authority. The great majority even of the learned, though they had become in some measure sensible of the thraldom in which they had been so long held, had not yet acquired courage to throw off the yoke. Hence it is, that we often perceive in the literary remains of those days, that strange mixture of satire and superstition which is
him, in line 39, ‘Ffriw Sain Dominig.’ He terms the friar ‘an old crow, always flying with his face towards heaven,’ ‘a brazen bell that incessantly pesters you with its noise,’ &c.
