3 1822026573857
 
 EDWARD B. NEEDHAM 
 CHARLESTON. W. VA. 
 
 EDWARD BUTUR NEEDHAM
 
 '* r! 
 
 ** 
 
 At 
 
 JNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO 
 
 3 1822026573857
 
 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS
 
 "The lesson writ in red since first time ran, 
 A hunter hunting down the beast in man ; 
 That till the chasing out of its last vice, 
 The flesh was fashioned but for sacrifice." 
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH
 
 'Das botffiwff' Superbta , MHIII 
 frlacc0,j*larev Jutn mm/s tj</a ruth 
 
 PRIDE. 
 (After Goltzius.) 
 
 [Frontispiece.
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERICK ROGERS 
 
 A. H. BULLEN 
 
 47, GREAT RUSSELL STREET, LONDON, W.C. 
 1907
 
 TO 
 
 ARTHUR C. HAYWARD 
 
 WITH WHOM I HAVE READ MANY BOOKS 
 
 AND FROM WHOM I HAVE HAD MUCH FRIENDSHIP 
 
 I DEDICATE THESE PAGES
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 LIST OF SINS AND VIRTUES 
 
 WORKS OF MERCY, SPIRITUAL GIFTS, AND PENITENTIAL 
 
 PSALMS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER I. THE SINS AND THE CHURCH - i 
 
 CHAPTER II. THE SINS AND RELIGIOUS DRAMA - - 1 1 
 
 CHAPTER III. THE SINS AND SOCIAL REVOLT - - - 29 
 
 CHAPTER IV. THE SINS IN COMMON LIFE 44 
 
 CHAPTER V. THE SINS AND THE REFORMATION 62 
 
 CHAPTER VI. THE SINS AND THE ELIZABETHANS - - 74 
 
 CHAPTER VII. EXEUNT THE SINS ------ 98
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 PRIDE (after Go/tzius) .... FRONTISPIECE 
 
 TO FACE PAGE 
 
 PRIDE (after De Pas) ...... 8 
 
 LECHERY . . . . . .l8 
 
 ENVY 3 2 
 
 WRATH . . . . . .42 
 
 COVETOUSNESS . . . . . .58 
 
 GLUTTONY . . . . . '7 
 
 SLOTH ...... 80 
 
 WRATH (after Peter Brueghil) 88 
 
 AVARICE . I OO
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE business of literature is the presentation 
 of life, all true literature resolves itself into 
 that. No presentation of life is complete without 
 its sins, and every master of literary art has known 
 it, from the poet King of Israel to Robert Browning. 
 The imagination of the Middle Ages, in many ways 
 more virile and expansive than our own, had a strong 
 grasp of this fact, and realised that it is the sense of 
 fault or error that lies at the root of every forward 
 movement, that there is no real progress unless it is 
 accompanied by a sense of sin. Other terms may be 
 used to describe the dynamic power which has moved 
 societies or individuals from lower ideals to higher, 
 but if we get beyond words to things, we see the sense 
 of the defective character, the unrealised ideal, always 
 and everywhere as the moving force. 
 
 To the Catholic Church, touched as it often has been 
 and not always to its detriment, with pagan mysticism, 
 the problem of evil was associated with a mystical 
 number ; and the succeeding pages are an endeavour 
 to trace the various presentations of the Seven Deadly 
 Sins as they have been given by men of powerful im- 
 agination, or profound insight, at different periods in 
 our literary history. If the sins in their mystical enu- 
 meration no longer keep the place that they once held 
 in Catholic theology, they nevertheless still represent 
 
 B
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 with wonderful accuracy what appear to be perman- 
 ent defects in the human character. They express 
 the experience of simpler, more strenuous, and in 
 some ways wiser ages than our own, when men stood 
 closer to the foundation facts of life, and saw its grim 
 and awful shadows where we only see its littleness 
 and meanness. But some of them saw the sunshine 
 as well as the shadow, and in the sunshine found the 
 key to all its problems. 
 
 As this book is written for ordinary readers who may 
 care about English Literature and English Life, and as 
 it travels over three or four centuries of that literature, 
 I have ventured here and there to modernise the 
 ancient prose and verse. From the standpoint of pure 
 scholarship this is open to criticism. The general 
 reader, I think, will be grateful. With the exception 
 of the passage from the prologue to Chaucer's "Can- 
 terbury Tales;" which is taken from Charles Cowden 
 Clarke, all the modernising is my own, though I owe 
 a line or two here and^ there to Professor Edward 
 Arber's version of William Dunbar's "Dance of the 
 Seven Deadly Sins." I felt very much as if I were 
 committing sacrilege when I laid my hands on Dun- 
 bar's rugged, but magnificent, poetry, but Time robs 
 us of many things, and Time is among the causes 
 which prevent the general reader from appreciating 
 as scholars can the beauties of William Dunbar. 
 
 I owe the fullest thanks to Mr. A. H. Bullen, and 
 to the Rev. Father Robert Hugh Benson, of the 
 Catholic Mission, Cambridge, for many valuable criti- 
 cisms and suggestions.
 
 "Philosophers have measured mountains 
 Fathomed the depths of seas, of states and kings ; 
 Walked with a staff to Heaven, and traced fountains ; 
 But there are two vast spacious things, 
 The Which to measure it doth more behove ; 
 Yet few there are that sound them Sin and Love." 
 
 GEORGE HERBERT. 
 
 The Seven Deadly Sins. 
 
 1. Superbia (Pride) 
 
 2. Luxuria (Lechery) 
 
 3. Invidia (Envy) 
 
 4. Ira (Wrath) 
 
 5. Avaritia (Covetousness) 
 
 6. Gula (Gluttony) 
 
 7. Accidia (Sloth) 
 
 The Seven Chief Virtues. 
 
 i . Humilitas 
 
 (Humility) 
 
 2. Castitas 
 
 (Chastity) 
 
 3. Caritas 
 
 (Love) 
 
 4. Patientia 
 
 (Patience) 
 
 5. Eleemosyna (Bounty) 
 
 6. Abstinentia (Abstinence) 
 
 7. Vigilantia (Vigilance)
 
 The Seven Spiritual Works 
 of Mercy. 
 
 1. To convert sinners 
 
 2. To instruct the ignorant 
 
 3. To counsel doubters 
 
 4. To comfort the sorrowful 
 
 5. To bear wrongs patiently 
 
 6. To forgive enemies 
 
 7. To pray for the living and 
 
 the dead 
 
 The Seven Corpora! Works 
 of Mercy. 
 
 1. To feed the hungry 
 
 2. To give drink to the thirsty 
 
 3. To clothe the naked 
 
 4. To shelter the homeless 
 
 5. To visit the sick 
 
 6. To visit the imprisoned 
 
 7. To bury the dead 
 
 The Seven Gifts of the Holy 
 Ghost. 
 
 Wisdom 
 
 Understanding 
 
 Counsel 
 
 Fortitude 
 
 Knowledge 
 
 6. Piety 
 
 7. The fear of God 
 
 The Seven Penitential 
 Psalms. 
 
 1 . Psalm 6 : 
 
 2. Psalm 32 : 
 
 3. Psalm 38 : 
 
 4. Psalm 5 1 : 
 
 5. Psalm 1 02 : 
 
 6. Psalm 130: 
 
 7. Psalm 143 : 
 
 Domine ne in furore 
 Beati quorum 
 Domine ne in furore 
 Miserere Mei Deus 
 Domine Exaudi 
 De Profundis 
 Domine Exaudi
 
 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 The Sins and the Church. 
 
 IN all ancient religions and philosophies alike the 
 number seven is chief among sacred or mystical 
 numbers. "Man," say the Chinese sacred books, 
 "has seven material souls" ; "man," says the Buddh- 
 ist philosopher, "is the representative of the great 
 seven-stringed world-lyre." Every quality, symbolic, 
 mystical or material seems to have been ascribed to the 
 number seven in ancient literature, but it is without 
 either religious or moral significance until we meet it 
 in the Hebrew Scriptures. It is still a mystical num- 
 ber there, but a change has passed over it which, if 
 it has cast no light on the why and wherefore of its 
 mysticism, has nevertheless given it a dignity, and 
 sometimes a haunting charm, it did not possess in 
 its earlier environment. William Ingpen, writing in 
 1624, says quaintly of the number, "It neither be- 
 getteth nor is begotten, this is its first divinity or 
 perfection"; and Alexander Cruden, says, "It is also 
 used in Scripture as a number of perfection." As in 
 the Hebrew Scripture, so in the doctrine and ritual of 
 the Christian Church we may trace the influence of 
 the mystic seven ; and the form in which it stamped
 
 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 itself most deeply upon the religious imagination of 
 the Western World was that of the Seven Deadly Sins. 
 
 The sins are, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Envy, Anger, 
 Avarice, and Sloth, and regarding them from a purely 
 ethical standpoint, it will be seen that they relate 
 entirely to life and character, not to opinion or be- 
 lief, and that any self-respecting pagan might have 
 regarded them as deadly, though not, of course, in the 
 same sense as the Catholic Church. They are not 
 ecclesiastical, or "church-made" sins, they represent 
 the defects of nature over which man has control, but 
 to which any human being may be subject. Whether 
 their mystical enumeration is of Christian or Pagan 
 origin, it is not possible to say with any certainty. 
 It is possible for such an enumeration to have had a 
 purely literary or imaginative origin, and to have been 
 accepted by the church, and incorporated with its doc- 
 trines, as a witness on man's side to God's revelation of 
 righteousness. Whatever its origin, the Seven Deadly 
 Sins represent the vices which from the beginning of 
 time have made havoc of the noblest aspirations of hu- 
 manity, and none knew this better than the poets and 
 dramatists who have found in them a well-spring of 
 moral, religious, and poetic inspiration for more than 
 a thousand years. Given a conviction of their reality, 
 and any man, whether priest, philosopher, or layman, 
 with imagination and a keen sense of the paradoxes 
 of life, could have given form and substance to those 
 mysterious cancers of the soul. 
 
 The utterances of St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430), 
 upon sin are clear and definite enough, and have been
 
 THE SINS AND THE CHURCH 3 
 
 adopted by St. Thomas Aquinas, and by Catholic 
 theologians generally, as their foundation principles in 
 dealing with this theme. "Any thought, word, or 
 deed, against the law of God." "Let each look to 
 his own soul ; if it sins it dies, sin is the death of the 
 soul." "It is the death of the soul to fall away from 
 God." The great Bishop and Saint in his definition 
 of venial and mortal sins, does not, however, give seven 
 sins as being deadly, but three, "But they who think 
 that all other sins are atoned for by almsgiving, yet 
 have no doubt of three being deadly, and such as re- 
 quire to be punished by excommunication, until they 
 be healed by a greater humility of penance idolatry, 
 unchastity, and murder." Scannell's Catholic Dic- 
 tionary (ed. 1903) says that the Fathers of the Church 
 used the terms venial and mortal sin in a different 
 sense to that of later theologians, and quotes from 
 Petavius: "The Fathers meant, not as we do, those 
 sins which deprive us of grace, but sins of an ag- 
 gravated character, which were specially named in 
 the canons, and synodical decrees, and which sub- 
 jected anyone who was guilty of them to canonical 
 penalties." To these they opposed the sins of daily 
 life, "some of which we call mortal, and some of 
 which we call venial." Development of doctrine 
 has always been a principle of the Catholic faith, and 
 the definition of sins mortal or venial as given by 
 the Catholic Church to-day is much more logical and 
 complete. The Church affirms that justification is a 
 renewal of man's nature by the grace of Jesus Christ, 
 and does not therefore admit that one who is in friend-
 
 4 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 ship with God is guilty of acts which will place him 
 in danger of eternal death. If then a soul is justi- 
 fied, that implies a passage from death unto life, from 
 sin unto holiness. Nevertheless it does not fail to 
 recognise in accordance with Scripture that none, not 
 even the most holy, can escape or avoid sin entirely, 
 unless by a special grace of God, which grace, it 
 teaches, was accorded to the Blessed Virgin. This 
 being so, it follows that sins are obviously of different 
 magnitude and character, some being in their nature 
 mortal, or deadly, and some being venial ; some being 
 of the body and some of the soul. A deliberate re- 
 jection of faith springing as it usually does from pride, 
 is a spiritual sin which would be regarded as capital 
 or deadly. The same would be true if the cause of 
 its rejection came from sins which found their origin 
 in the carnal appetites. But all sin, whether mortal 
 or venial, tends to separate the soul from God. 
 
 A close analogy is apparent between human friend- 
 ship and the friendship of the soul with God. There 
 may be offences committed between friends that are 
 sufficient to destroy friendship entirely, while other 
 offences strain and weaken it. In the same way there 
 are sins that destroy, and others that weaken, the 
 grace of God within the soul. The Apostle Paul, 
 speaking of certain sins, says, "they who do such 
 things cannot enter into the kingdom of God" (Gal- 
 atians, chap. 5, verse 21). The distinction between 
 mortal and venial sins is therefore good in logic, in 
 harmony with experience, and commends itself to 
 common sense. The first strike at the very founda-
 
 THE SINS AND THE CHURCH 5 
 
 tions of moral and spiritual life, utterly destroy grace 
 and charity, and cause the death of the soul. The last, 
 though they may dispose to, and by accumulation 
 create mortal sin, do not, unless they reach it, destroy 
 the friendship of the soul with God. Venial sin is a 
 disease of the soul, but is not its death, since the grace 
 of God remains by which it may be cured. Mortal 
 sin is, on the contrary, irreparable, and those who are 
 guilty of it have lost every principle of vitality, and 
 are spiritually dead. No power of renewal can come 
 from within, but the power of God is without limit, 
 as is also His mercy, and He can, if He will, make the 
 dead soul hear His voice and live. Final impenitence 
 is an unpardonable sin. 
 
 On such a tremendous subject, however, Catholic 
 scholars have always allowed that absolute decisions 
 as to particular sins must often be difficult. Venial 
 sins can be classed with deadly sins, differing from 
 them however in being either lighter in their matter 
 or lacking knowledge or deliberation in their doing. 
 The acts of the will and the extent to which they 
 have been influenced by deliberation, have to be 
 taken into account, as well as the evil wrought by 
 the sin itself. Where there is no deliberation, there 
 is no act of the will, and where there is no act of 
 the will, it is difficult to show there is sin. Man 
 does not fall away from God by mischance, but only 
 by an act of the will, and logically it would appear 
 that any grave sin acted with deliberate intention 
 must be classed as mortal. On the other hand, a 
 sin of undoubted magnitude, like theft, may really
 
 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 have very small moral results, while smaller sins by 
 accumulation may destroy the soul, just as a sufficient 
 number of pin pricks in the veins and arteries would 
 cause the body to bleed to death. A sin therefore is 
 deadly when it is of sufficient magnitude to have con- 
 sequences far-reaching and large, and is the result of 
 a deliberate act of the will. It is venial sin when its 
 consequences are small ; when it is not the result of in- 
 tention, but of weakness, carelessness, or foolishness. 
 
 St. Augustine has little to say of the Seven Deadly 
 Sins, but has much to say of mystical numbers, and 
 especially of the number seven. He regards it as a 
 sacred number, and the symbol of all time. In one 
 of his New Testament sermons, he says: "Seven then 
 is usually put for a whole, because in seven days the 
 revolution of time is completed, and when the seventh 
 day is ended, it returneth to the first again, that the 
 same revolution may be continued. In such revo- 
 lutions whole ages pass away, and yet there is no 
 departure from the number seven. What then is 
 'seven times a day will I praise thee' but what is said 
 in another place, ' His praise shall always be in my 
 mouth?'" 
 
 In the "City of God," where he is discussing the 
 creation of the world, he gives a much fuller develop- 
 ment of his ideas in regard to mystical numbers, and 
 says ; 
 
 "And these were performed in six days because 
 of the perfection of the number six, one being six 
 times repeated : not that God was tied to time, and 
 could not have created all at once, and afterwards have
 
 THE SINS AND THE CHURCH J 
 
 bound the motions to time's congruence, but because 
 that number signified the perfection of the work : for 
 six is the first number that is filled by conjunction of 
 the parts, the sixth, the third, and the half: which is 
 one, two and three; all which conjoined are six. Parts 
 in numbers are those that may be described of how 
 many they are, as a half, a third, a fourth, and so forth. 
 But four being in nine, yet is no just part of it : one 
 is the ninth part, and three the third part. But these 
 two parts, one and three, are far from making nine 
 the whole. So four is a part of ten, but no just part: 
 one is the tenth part, two the fifth, and five the sec- 
 ond, yet these three parts, one, two, and five, make 
 not up full ten, but eight only. As for the number 
 of twelve, the parts exceed it. For there is one the 
 twelfth part, six the second, four the third, three the 
 fourth, and two the sixth. But one, two, three, four, 
 and six, make above twelve, namely sixteen. This by 
 the way now to prove the perfection of the number 
 six, the first (as I said), that is made of the con- 
 junction of the parts: and in this did God make perfect 
 all His works. Wherefore this number is not to be 
 despised, but has the esteem apparently confirmed by 
 many places of Scripture. Nor was it said in vain of 
 God's works, 'Thou madest all things in number, 
 weight and measure.' (Wisd. xi.) 
 
 "But on the seventh day, that is, the seventh repe- 
 tition of the first day (which number has perfection 
 also in another kind), God rested, and gave the first 
 rule of sanctification therein. The day that had no 
 even, God would not sanctify in His works but in rest.
 
 8 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 For there is none of His works, but being considered 
 first in God, and then in itself, will produce a day's 
 knowledge, and an even's. Of the perfection of seven, 
 I could say much, but this volume grows big, and I 
 fear I shall be held rather to take occasion to show my 
 small skill, than to respect others' edification. There- 
 fore we must have a care of gravity and moderation, 
 lest running all upon number, we be thought neglec- 
 ters of weight and measure. Let this be sufficient 
 admonition, that three is the first number, wholly odd, 
 and four wholly even, and these two make seven, 
 which is therefore oftentimes put for all ; as here, 
 'The just shall fall seven times a day, and rise again,' 
 that is, 'How oftsoever he fall, he shall rise again.' 
 (Prov. xxiv. 1 6.) (This is not meant of iniquity, but 
 of tribulation, drawing him to humility.) Again, 
 'Seven times a day will I praise thee;' the same he 
 had said before : ' His praise shall be always in my 
 mouth.' Many such places as these the Scripture 
 has, to prove the number of seven to be often used 
 for "all," "universally." Therefore is the Holy Spirit 
 called oftentimes by this number, of whom Christ 
 said, 'He shall teach us all truth.' There is God's 
 rest, wherein we rest in God : in this whole, in this 
 perfection is rest, in the part of it was labour : there- 
 fore we labour, because we know as yet but in part, 
 but when perfection is come, that which is in part 
 shall be abolished. This makes us search the Scrip- 
 tures so laboriously. But the holy angels (unto whose 
 glorious congregation our toilsome pilgrimage casts a 
 long look), as they have eternal permanence, so have
 
 jtbteeo , flaceo 
 J&rupte !)fiftuchut08r per me, 
 . iGreJff, maam^tiie 
 
 PKIDE. 
 
 (After De Vos.) 
 
 [Page 8.
 
 THE SINS AND THE CHURCH 9 
 
 they easy knowledge, and happy rest in God, helping 
 us without trouble, because their spiritual, pure, and 
 free motions are without labour." 
 
 The Seven Deadly Sins have their opposites in the 
 Seven chief Virtues, which are Humility, Chastity, 
 Love, Patience, Bounty, Temperance, and Vigilance. 
 It is a conjecture of Prof. Henry Sidgwick's, more 
 ingenious than convincing, that the chief virtues were 
 the result of a combination made by St. Augustine 
 of the four pagan virtues enumerated by Plato 
 Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Courage with 
 the Christian graces of Faith, Hope, and Charity, and 
 that this determined the ground plan of systematic 
 ethics for subsequent ecclesiastical writers generally. 
 In antithesis to the list of virtues an enumeration of 
 the chief deadly sins obtained currency. They were 
 at first reckoned as eight, but a preference for mystical 
 numbers "characteristic of medieval theologians" re- 
 duced them to seven. 
 
 The ingenuity and plausibility of the theory make 
 its accuracy doubtful, especially when there is little 
 evidence either in the writings of Augustine or out of 
 them to support it. Sidgwick urges also that, inasmuch 
 as the sins are variously stated in the early theological 
 writers, and include, Envy, Vain-Glory, Gloominess, 
 and Languid Indifference, a study of the list as a whole 
 "shows them to represent the moral experience of the 
 monastic life." Very probably they did, but we must 
 go deeper than that statement will take us. They 
 represented the moral experience of monastic life, be- 
 cause monasteries were peopled with human beings, 
 the majority of whom were not saints, though some
 
 IO THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 of them no doubt honestly tried to be. But the sins 
 stood just as well for the moral experience of the 
 world outside. 
 
 Present-day writers on occult subjects, on the other 
 hand, who attach significance and value to mystical 
 numbers, claim that the sins came into the Church 
 when Christianity was in touch with a more ancient 
 faith, and find their origin in the religion of ancient 
 Egypt, a religion in which magic and mystical num- 
 bers played no inconsiderable part. 
 
 The Dean of Christ Church (Bampton Lectures, 
 1895), points out "how very powerful the influence 
 of the mystical method of interpretation was upon the 
 systematisation of moral ideas. A similar account may 
 be given of the origin of the classification of deadly 
 sins. It seems to have been developed by the monks 
 of the Egyptian desert on the basis of this method of 
 exegesis. Origen regards the nations whom the chil- 
 dren of Israel were to overcome in Palestine as types 
 of the sins which occupy the souls of man . 
 The earliest method of the classification in the form 
 which it finally assumed is in the East, and it comes 
 from the Egyptian desert." Other writers to whom 
 he refers as doing their part in the final classification 
 of the sins, are also Egyptians, or dwellers in Egypt, 
 so that the balance of evidence from all sources seems 
 to point to Egypt, with its religion of mystery, as the 
 place whence the influence of mystical methods of 
 interpreting came. Why that influence succeeded in 
 so powerfully shaping the imagination of the Christian 
 world for something over ten centuries, is a question 
 that still awaits an answer.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Sins and Religious Drama. 
 
 TO the writers of religious plays the sins were 
 replete with dramatic possibilities, of which, 
 however, they did not avail themselves to any great 
 extent. It is difficult to say with certainty when these 
 plays were first performed in England, but Matthew 
 Paris mentions the performance of a miracle play on 
 the life of St. Catherine in the year iioo, and it 
 was in the thirteenth century, when they were first 
 written in the language of the common people, that 
 their great influence began. Standing as they often 
 did in the place of the sermon, and aiming as they 
 always did to teach, by dramatic representation, the 
 doctrines of the Catholic faith, they are an intensely 
 interesting and valuable branch of our ancient litera- 
 ture. But there is no genius, though there is oc- 
 casionally fine imagination, among them, and both 
 sins and virtues when we meet them in religious 
 drama tend to become conventional and common- 
 place. As impersonations the sins are more striking 
 than the virtues, but then they were always much 
 closer to the facts of life, and were never in any 
 danger of becoming mere abstractions, as the virtues 
 often were. They naturally made excellent dramatic 
 contrasts to the virtues, and found their place when
 
 I 2 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 comedy was required and evil was a cause of mirth, 
 as well as when the play concerned itself with deeper 
 themes, such as Temperance, Righteousness, and Judg- 
 ment to come. But on the whole the writers of these 
 plays were preachers with a didactic or a religious 
 purpose rather than dramatic artists, and more was 
 done with the sins by preaching about them, than 
 by letting them in their naked hideousness preach for 
 themselves. 
 
 In the Chester Plays (1477), tnere is good sermon- 
 ising on three deadly sins; not however the three 
 referred to by St. Augustine. The following intro- 
 ductory passages (dated 1628), on the cover of MS. 
 Harl., 2124, record facts concerning their author- 
 ship : 
 
 The Whitsun Plays were first made by Don Randle Heggenet, 
 Monk of Chester Abbey, who was thrice at Rome, before he could 
 obtain leave of the Pope to have them in the English tongue. 
 
 The Whitsun Plays were played openly in pageants, by the citi- 
 zens of Chester in Whitsun week. 
 
 Nicholas the Fifth then was Pope, in the year of our Lord, 
 
 Sir Henry Ffrancis, sometime a monk of the Monastery of Chester, 
 obtained of Pope Clemens a thousand days of pardon for every person 
 that resorted peaceably to see the same plays, and that every person 
 that disturbed the same, to be accursed by the same Pope until such 
 time as they be absolved thereof. 
 
 On the first leaf of another MS., Harl. 2013, it 
 is said : 
 
 The proclamation for Whitsun Plays, made by William Newall, 
 clerk: William Snead, second year mayor. For as much as in old time, 
 not only for the augmentation and increase of the Holy and Catholic 
 Faith of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and to exhort the minds of com- 
 mon people to good devotion and wholesome doctrine thereof; but
 
 THE SINS AND RELIGIOUS DRAMA 13 
 
 also for the commonwealth and prosperity of this city, a play, and 
 declaration of divers stories of the Bible, beginning with the Creation, 
 and fall of Lucifer, and ending with the general judgment of the 
 world, to be declared and played in the Whitsun week, was devised 
 and made by our Sir Henry Francis, sometime monk of this monastery 
 dissolved. Who obtained and got of Clement, Bishop of Rome, 
 1000 days of pardon granted from thenceforth to every person resort- 
 ing in peaceable manner, with good devotion to hear and see the said 
 plays from time to time as oft as they shall be played in the said city. 
 And that every person, or persons, disturbing the said plays, may in 
 any wise be accused by the authority of the said Pope Clement's 
 bulls until such times as he, or they, be absolved thereof, which plays 
 were devised to the honour of God, by John Arnway, then Mayor 
 of this City of Chester, and his brethren and the whole commonality 
 thereof, to be brought forth, declared and played at the cost and charges 
 of the craftsmen and occupations of the said city, which hither unto, 
 from time to time, used and performed the same accordingly. 
 
 The Chester Plays are excellent specimens of pop- 
 ular religious drama, and its position, and influence 
 are both concisely expressed in these introductory 
 remarks on the two manuscripts. Sir John Arnway 
 was Mayor of Chester in 1327 and 1328, and this 
 period may be taken as the approximate date of the 
 plays. There is a rhymed instruction to the various 
 trades as to the particular episode of the story which 
 they have to set forth : often delightfully simple, and 
 full of humour and fine religious feeling. The tanners, 
 who " of custom old the fall of Lucifer did set out," are 
 exhorted to a careful rendering of the text, and a 
 proper dressing of the characters, and to let their show 
 be 
 
 Good speech, fine players, with apparrel comely. 
 
 To the drapers is given the "Creation of the World,," 
 and they are bidden "according to your wealth, set it 
 
 D
 
 14 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 out wealthily;" to the "good simple water leaders 
 and drawers of Dee" is committed the pageant of the 
 Flood ; the " Wax Chandlers of ancient time " have the 
 story of Abraham; and the cappers and linen drapers, 
 "that worthy story of Balaam and his ass, and of 
 Balak the King," and are exhorted to 
 
 Make the ass speak, and set it out lively. 
 The " wrights and slaters, with good players in 
 shew," have the "Birth of Christ" to present, and 
 are to "bring forth your well-decked carriage" ; and 
 the painters and glasiers, who have to present the 
 "Angels' Annunciation of the Nativity," have, per- 
 haps, the most charming verse in the whole of the 
 "Banes": 
 
 The appearing angel, and star on Christ's birth 
 
 To shepherds poor, of base and low degree, 
 
 You painters and glasiers, deck out with all mirth, 
 
 And see that "Gloria in Excelsis" be sung merrily. 
 
 Few words in that pageant make mirth truly, 
 
 For all the author had to stand upon, 
 
 Was "Glory to God on High," and "Peace on Earth to Man." 
 
 The plays were performed by the various companies 
 in various parts of the city, by the aid of pageant 
 wagons and on a movable stage, with (there can be 
 no doubt) a double, and occasionally a triple division 
 in them to represent Heaven, the World, and Hell. 
 In the play of the "Temptation," performed by the 
 Guild of the Butchers, we find the sermon on the three 
 sins. Satan, "the devil in his feathers, all ragged and 
 rent," enters and soliloquises about the mystery which 
 surrounds the person of Christ, and resolves to over- 
 come Him, and to make Him subject to himself:
 
 What great and master man is this 
 Who in the world hath come ? 
 His mother I wot did never amiss, 
 And that now marvailes me. 
 
 He is a man from foot to crown, 
 Gotten without corruption ; 
 Nor knew I ever one before 
 So clean of conversation. 
 
 Among the sinful sin doth He none, 
 
 And purer He than any one ; 
 
 He seems to be of blood and bone, 
 
 And wiser than ever man was. 
 
 Avarice none nor Envy 
 
 In Him could I espy; 
 
 He hath no gold in treasury, 
 
 Nor tempted is by sight. 
 
 Pride hath He none nor Gluttony, 
 
 Nor liking He of Lechery : 
 
 His mouth I never heard to lie, 
 
 Neither by day nor night. 
 
 My Highness aye He putteth behind 
 
 For in Him fault I none can find ; 
 
 If He be God in mann6s kind, 
 
 My craft then fully fails. 
 
 It does fail. The episode of the temptation is simply 
 and beautifully given in a lengthy, but forcible and 
 dramatic scene ; Satan is duly routed as in the New 
 Testament story, and then enters the "Expositor." 
 He resembles the chorus of the classical plays, explains 
 the points of the story to those who may have missed 
 them, and preaches his sermon on the three sins 
 which proved deadly to Adam, but which Christ re- 
 pelled.
 
 1 6 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 Expositor. 
 
 Lo ! lordlings, God's righteousness, 
 St. Gregory so makes mind express, 
 Since Adam overcome he was 
 By three things to do evil. 
 Gluttony and Vain-Glory are two, 
 Covetousness, yea that also 
 By these three things withouten moe, 
 Christ overcame the Devil. 
 
 Adam was tempted to Gluttony 
 When of the fruit falsely 
 The Devil made him to eat. 
 And tempted he was to Vain-Glory 
 When sought he him great mastery 
 To have godhead unworthily 
 Through eating of that meat. 
 
 He tempted was to Avarice, 
 
 When he net him to be wise, 
 
 Know good and ill at his devise 
 
 More than he was worthy. 
 
 For Covetousness, Gregory saith, express 
 
 Sins not only with riches 
 
 But in desiring haughtiness 
 
 And highest place unlawfully 
 
 And state unskilfully. 
 
 Also Christ in these sins three 
 
 Was tempted as you well might see, 
 
 For in Gluttony, believe you me, 
 
 He moved Him as you saw here 
 
 When he enticed Him through His rede 
 
 To turn the stones into bread 
 
 And so to prove His Godhead, 
 
 Of which He was in fear. 
 
 In Vayne-Glory he tempted also, 
 When he excited Him down to go 
 The pinnacle of the Temple froe, 
 An unskilful gate.
 
 THE SINS AND RELIGIOUS DRAMA IJ 
 
 And in Covetousness He tempted was, 
 When he shewed Him such riches 
 And het Him lands, both more and less, 
 And there through great estate. 
 
 But Adam fell through his trespass, 
 
 But Christ withstood him through His grace, 
 
 For of His Godhead Sathanas 
 
 That time was clean deceived. 
 
 In the "Conversion of St. Paul," a play from the 
 Digby Mysteries, there is a sermon (Dr. Furnivall says 
 a dull one) on the Seven Deadly Sins. The Digby 
 Mysteries were edited by him for the Early English 
 Text Society, and he puts I 540 as their probable date. 
 The preacher is the Apostle Paul, who is called Saulus, 
 and his sermon brings the play to its conclusion. 
 
 The Lord that is shaper of sea and land 
 
 And hath wrought with His word all things at His will, 
 
 Save this assembly that here sits or stands, 
 
 For His meek mercy that we do not fail. 
 
 Grant me, good Lord, Thy pleasure to fulfil 
 
 And send me such speech that I the truth say, 
 
 My intentions profitable to move, if I may. 
 
 Well-beloved friends, there be Seven Mortal Sins 
 Which are proved principal and princes of poisons ; 
 Pride, that of bitterness all bale begins, 
 Witholding all faith it feedeth and foysonnes, 
 As Holy Scripture beareth plain witness, 
 Inttium omnium peccatorum mperbia est, 
 That often destroyeth both most and least. 
 
 Of all vices and folly Pride is the root ; 
 Humility may not reign nor yet endure : 
 Pity alack ! that is flower and helper 
 Is exiled where Pride hath succour.
 
 1 8 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 Good Lord give us grace to understand and persever, 
 
 Omnis qul se exaltat humiliabitur, 
 
 Thy word, as Thou bidst to fulfil ever. 
 
 But dread alway Sin and Folly, 
 
 Wrath, Envy, Covetousness, and Sluggishness; 
 
 Exit out of thy sight Gluttony and Lechery, 
 
 Vanity and Vain-Glory, and false Idleness : 
 
 These be the branches of all wickedness : 
 
 Who that in him these vices root 
 
 He lacketh all grace, and bale is his boot. 
 
 Learn of Myself for I am meek in heart, 
 
 Our Lord to His servants thus He saith, 
 For meekness I suffered a spear in My heart ; 
 Meekness all vices annuleth and delayeth ; 
 Rest to souls shall find Him in faith : 
 Discite a me, quia mitis sum, et corde kumilis, 
 Et invenietis requiem animabus vestris. 
 
 So our Saviour showeth example of meekness, 
 Through grace of His goodness meekly He stands ; 
 Truly it will save us from the sins sickness, 
 For Pride and his progeny meekness confounds ; 
 Quanta motor es, tanto humilia te in omnibus ; 
 The greater thou art the lower look thou be, 
 Bear thee never the higher for thy degree. 
 
 In the "Castle of Perseverance" (A.D. 1425), the 
 Sins appear not only as tempters but as warriors too, 
 though it must be confessed they are, in this latter 
 capacity, of a feeble type. "The Castle of Perse- 
 verance" has been long known as an exceedingly fine 
 specimen of the old morality play, but it remained in 
 manuscript till 1904, when it was published by the 
 Early English Text Society, and edited by Dr. F. J. 
 Furnivall and Mr. A. W. Pollard. It is a play of
 
 j&**it1jP 
 
 mf*ff. 
 
 vxtas Jfraclpeamc. ft jfatmon 
 (ffrmaaaz impatzfirs ordet- amare^tx: . 
 
 LECHKKV. 
 (After De los.) 
 
 [Page ib.
 
 THE SINS AND RELIGIOUS DRAMA 19 
 
 great length, and full of life and movement, occa- 
 sionally marred by the coarseness always more or less 
 present in old religious drama, but it is probably a 
 more faithful presentation of life on that account. It 
 is chiefly the devils who are foul-mouthed in these 
 plays, and if some of their filth is unendurable to-day 
 in print, it is still the filth of the natural man, the mud 
 and sewage which are the castings-ofF of the animal 
 nature, and not that fouler uncleanness of which we 
 meet so much in the literature of the Renaissance and 
 later. The play covers the whole of human life, from 
 the cradle to the tomb, and has Heaven, Earth, and 
 Hell for its background. Episodes in life were not 
 to the taste of the medieval imagination ; the men of 
 those days strove for a larger outlook, and endeavoured 
 up to their lights to compass the whole experience of 
 man's life on earth and sometimes otherwhere. 
 
 The "Castle of Perseverance " opens with the usual 
 prologue, spoken, however, by several persons ; ap- 
 parently because its length made it impossible for one. 
 It commences with " Gloria in Excelsis Deo," and 
 then the audience are bidden to see themselves in the 
 chief character of the play, who is called Humanum 
 Genus, or Mankind. He enters the world naked and 
 helpless, dowered with his " Five Wyttes," and has the 
 power of choice between good and ill. At his right 
 hand stands his good angel to lead him heavenward, 
 at his left his evil angel to make him subject to the 
 powers of hell. Neither can influence him against 
 his will, but each in turn tries to do so.
 
 20 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 The good angel coveteth evermore man's salvation, 
 The bad beseteth him evermore to his damnation, 
 And God hath given man free arbitration, 
 Whether he will himself save, or his soul peril. 
 
 Mankind is young ; the World, the Flesh, and the 
 Devil beset him with their snares, and chief among 
 the Devil's henchmen are the Seven Deadly Sins. 
 There is no attempt at characterisation ; they are 
 names and nothing more, but Mankind chooses to 
 follow the World and the Sins, and the moral of his 
 so doing is driven home vigorously even by the vo- 
 taries of the three lower powers; Pleasure saying 
 
 Whoso will with folly ruled be, 
 He is worthy to be servant here, 
 
 That draweth to sins seven. 
 Whoso will be false and covetous, 
 With this world he shall have land and house j 
 This world's wisdom careth not a louse 
 
 For God or for high Heaven." 
 
 He remains bound to the pleasures of his lower nature 
 till he reaches " forty wynters old," and then a de- 
 sire for amendment comes. The World has given 
 him of its treasures to the full, the Sins Seven have 
 ministered to his fleshly pleasures and vices, but there 
 is no satisfaction in his soul. 
 
 We have eaten garlic everyone, 
 And if I should to Hell now go, 
 I wot I shall not go alone. 
 
 Relief comes to him through contrition and penance, 
 and by their advice he resolves to amend his past 
 errors, and, forsaking the Seven Sins for the Seven 
 Virtues, he enters the "Castle of Perseverance" to
 
 THE SINS AND RELIGIOUS DRAMA 21 
 
 the joy of his Good Angel, and to the wrath of the 
 Angel of 111. 
 
 His penitence is not a shallow thing; it is meant to 
 be whole-hearted and real, but it is not lasting. 
 
 Out upon thee, deadly sin ; 
 Sin thou hast mankind destroyed ; 
 In deadly sin my life is spent ; 
 Mercy ! God omnipotent. 
 
 The entrenchment of Mankind in the " Castle of 
 Perseverance," and the endeavour of the Seven Sins 
 under the direction of the Bad Angel to dislodge him 
 therefrom, must have led to some stage effects that 
 were highly realistic according to the dramatic stan- 
 dards which then existed. 
 
 If thou wilt to Heaven win 
 And keep from thee worldly distance, 
 Go to yon castle and keep therein 
 For it is stronger than any in France. 
 
 The pageant wagon with its three divisions for 
 Heaven, Earth, and Hell was sometimes unequal to the 
 task imposed on it, and the open ground with perhaps 
 the kind of simple scenic accessaries that may occa- 
 sionally be seen in the booths of an old-fashioned 
 country fair helped out the imagination of the audience. 
 There is in the MS. of the play a rude sketch or plan 
 which appears to indicate the spectacular form which 
 the performance took. A circular ditch is depicted 
 of which it is said, "This is the water about the place, 
 if any ditch may be made there, it shall be played or 
 else that it be strongly barred all about, and let nothing 
 over many stiles be within." At the four points of 
 
 E
 
 22 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 the compass are the " skaffolds " on which appear God, 
 the World, the Flesh, and the Devil; God and the 
 World standing east and west, and the Devil and the 
 Flesh north and south. North-east, lying between 
 Deus and Belial, is a scaffold for Covetousness, who 
 has an important and final part to play when the battle 
 between the Sins and the Virtues is over. In the 
 centre of the circle is the "Castle of Perseverance," 
 in which Mankind entrenches himself with the Virtues, 
 now that his repentance has led him from his evil ways ; 
 and beneath the castle is the bed of Mankind on which, 
 presumably, his life begins and ends. 
 
 Within the castle Mankind is safe, the Sins cannot 
 harm him except he gives them power to do so, and 
 Humility bursts forth into song at his deliverance 
 from the evil powers, 
 
 Now blessed be our lady, of Heaven Empress. 
 Now doth Mankind from folly fall, 
 And is in the castle of Goodness ; 
 He haunteth now Heaven's hall. 
 
 In response to her song of joy comes the defiance of 
 the Bad Angel, who in no way fears the Virtues, or 
 anything they can do, but is certain of ultimate vic- 
 tory. 
 
 Nay ! by Belial's bright bones, 
 
 There shall he in no wise dwell, 
 
 He shall be won from holy ways, 
 
 To the World the Flesh and the Devil of Hell. 
 
 The Seven Sins, the kings three 
 To Mankind hath enmity ; 
 Sharply shall they now help me, 
 This castle for to break.
 
 THE SINS AND RELIGIOUS DRAMA 23 
 
 Ho ! Flibbertigibbet ! Backbiter ! 
 Our message look you make. 
 Blithe about you look you bear ! 
 See Mankind his sins doth forsake. 
 
 Ho ! Flibbertigibbet run and haste, 
 Bid the World, the Fiend, the Flesh, 
 That they come to fighting fresh, 
 To win again Mankind. 
 
 It is clear he has all the qualities of leader, and the 
 Seven Deadly Sins rally to his standard at once. But 
 they are poor creatures in themselves, and the Bad 
 Angel has good reason to complain of the quality of 
 his army. Backbiter is, however, an excellent lieu- 
 tenant, and calls upon the Flesh and the World to 
 recapture Mankind. The battle between the Sins and 
 the Virtues is a fine dramatic episode. It is preceded 
 by a tirade of abuse hurled by the Sins against their 
 amiable and highly respectable opponents. The abuse 
 is medieval Billinsgate, and differs in no way in essentials 
 from Billinsgate of the present day. Even the terms 
 are often identical, and a very little alteration indeed 
 would make the dialogue resemble a slanging match 
 between a band of irate women in the slums of White- 
 chapel to-day. There are, however, poetic touches 
 in the incident. The Sins hurl filth, but the Virtues 
 respond with roses, and the fragrant missiles when 
 they fall on the Bad Angel and his deadly army, beat 
 them black and blue, and they retire discomfited from 
 the field. 
 
 It is only for a time. One Sin still nestles in the 
 heart of Mankind, and eventually draws him from his
 
 24 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 stronghold. Time has cooled the heats of youth and 
 passion, and the Sins which haunt life's beginning 
 have less power with later years, and no farther attacks 
 are openly made upon the castle. But there still re- 
 mains Covetousness. It was an old belief that this 
 sin was an ordinary vice of age, and Byron shared it 
 when he wrote : 
 
 So for a good old-gentlemanly vice 
 I think I must take up with avarice. 
 
 As age creeps nearer, Mankind who has now no 
 longer grace to stay within the walls of the castle- 
 holds parley with Covetousness : 
 
 Covetousness, whither should I wend ? 
 
 What way wouldest thou I should hold ? 
 
 To what place wouldest thou me send ? 
 
 I begin to wax hoary and cold : 
 
 My back begin neth to bow and bend : 
 
 I crawl and creep and wax all cold. 
 
 Mankind returns to the world, and the Sins finally 
 win their battle. The Virtues do their best to per- 
 suade, but, except for a quaint touch here and there, 
 it must be confessed that their arguments are tedious. 
 Abstinence tells him 
 
 This world is like a three-legged stool, 
 It fails a man at his greatest need. 
 
 Industry urges that wealth is nothing when death 
 draws nigh, and wonders at his resolve to leave the 
 castle 
 
 Mankind, of one thing have I wonder, 
 Thou takest not in time to mend ; 
 When body and soul are parted in sunder 
 No worldly good shall with thee wend, 
 When thou art dead and in the earth lie under.
 
 THE SINS AND RELIGIOUS DRAMA 25 
 
 Generosity has her exhortation also, and pleads against 
 Covetousness, but without effect ; 
 
 Mankind saith he hath never enowe, 
 Till his mouth be full of clay. 
 When he is closed in grasp of death, 
 What help in riches or great array ? 
 It flyeth away like any snow, 
 Anon after thy ending day. 
 
 The dialogue ends with a scornful and unclean out- 
 burst on the part of the Bad Angel. He is victor and 
 knows it, and he spits out foulness at the Virtues, and 
 bears off Mankind captive once more. 
 
 Ba ! go forth and let the queans cackle. 
 Where women are, are many words : 
 Let them go hopping with their hackle ! 
 
 He rhymes, but his rhyme is unprintable, and the 
 play is full of a sad pathetic irony until the end is 
 reached. Death comes, and Mankind realises the 
 truth of what the Virtues have said. All his worldly 
 goods are taken from him and given to a youth, whose 
 name is " I know not who." The World, the Flesh, 
 and the Bad Angel laugh at him with bitter mirth, 
 and he sinks lifeless on the bed beneath the castle. 
 
 With the modern dramatist death must end all, 
 but it did not with the writers of the religious plays. 
 The soul of man comes forth from the body and asks 
 mercy. The Bad Angel claims the soul and says it 
 must go with him to Hell, and the Good Angel dis- 
 putes his claim. Then begins a long discussion between 
 Mercy, Righteousness, Truth, and Justice. It is a 
 discussion of the schoolmen brought down to the level 
 of a popular audience, and excellently well it is done.
 
 26 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 Mercy hears the cry of the soul, and pleads for it for 
 Christ's sake. 
 
 When the Jews preferred Christ esyl and gall on the Good Friday, 
 God granted that remission, 
 Mercy and Absolution, 
 Through virtue of His passion, 
 To no man should be said "nay." 
 
 Justice argues against Mercy with much skill and 
 with strict logic. She admits the force of her sister's 
 argument, but the evidence of evil-doing is beyond 
 dispute, a death-bed repentance is a worthless thing, 
 and offers no guarantee of a good life, and Mankind 
 has not sought Mercy in life. 
 
 Sister, ye saith with good skill 
 
 That Mercy passeth man's misdeeds, 
 
 But take Mercy whoso will, 
 
 He must ask with love and dread ; 
 
 And every man that will fulfil 
 
 The deadly sins and follow misdeeds, 
 
 Then let him lie in Hell and stink, 
 
 As he hath brewed let him drink, 
 The Devil shall quit him his meed. 
 
 Truth and Justice demand Mankind's damnation, but 
 Mercy and Pity plead for his forgiveness. It could 
 not have been God's ordinance, they argue, that Man- 
 kind should suffer for ever. Some factor is in the 
 problem which is not of God. God hears the argu- 
 ment, and, much after the manner of a modern judge, 
 takes time to consider. It is not His wish, He says, 
 to condemn Mankind to perpetual torment, and if He 
 can find cause for mercy He will. He does. The 
 Sins are the false element not of His creation, but His
 
 THE SINS AND RELIGIOUS DRAMA 27 
 
 forgiveness will destroy them. Quaintly and in child- 
 like fashion He bids His daughters four, Peace, Justice, 
 Truth, and Mercy, "take Mankind," 
 
 Bring him to Me 
 
 And set here by My knee, 
 
 In heaven to be, 
 
 In bliss with games and glee. 
 
 Then comes the turn of the Bad Angel. All through 
 the play he has been victorious, but he is beaten now, 
 commanded to release Mankind, and Justice orders 
 
 him 
 
 Go thou to Hell 
 
 Thou devil as bold as a bell, 
 
 Therein to dwell, 
 
 In brass and brimstone to boil. 
 
 God then delivers a final homily in New Testament 
 language, saying that 
 
 The good on the right side shall stand full sure, 
 
 The bad on the left side there shall I set. 
 
 The seven deeds of mercy whoso hath done, 
 
 To the hungry to give meat, 
 
 Or drink to the thirsty, or to the naked vesture, 
 
 The poor or the pilgrim home to take, 
 
 Or thy neighbour that hath need 
 
 Heaven's bliss shall be his meed. 
 
 And the play ends with the lines 
 
 Thus endeth our games. 
 To save you from sinning, 
 Ever at the beginning 
 Think on your last ending. 
 Te Deum, Laudamus ! " 
 
 In dramatic construction crude, and in characteri- 
 sation weak, dealing frankly with facts of life which are
 
 28 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 veiled on the modern stage, the " Castle of Persever- 
 ance" is nevertheless an intensely human play, and has 
 those qualities, indefinable, but real and permanent, 
 which grip and hold the imagination. In the broad 
 and sweeping survey of life which the authors of such 
 plays took, nothing that happened to men and women 
 was too small to be ignored. An honest effort was 
 made to see the facts of life in their true perspective, 
 and in their actual relations to each other, and Nature 
 to these men had nothing that was common or un- 
 clean. The mimic warfare on the stage between the 
 Sins and Virtues typified the eternal warfare which 
 goes on in the heart of man, between base ideals and 
 noble, between good and evil, the senses and the soul.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Sins and Social Revolt. 
 
 THERE seems to have been a perfect passion for 
 allegory in fourteenth century literature, and to 
 this the Sins lent themselves readily enough ; it was 
 their natural environment, their proper place. The 
 rising of the peasants, under the leadership of Wat 
 Tyler in 1381, and the social wrongs and unrest of 
 which these movements were symptoms, had to find, 
 and did find literary expression. It is in this ferment, 
 and the intellectual activity that followed after it, that 
 the Seven Deadly Sins gradually occupy an important 
 place in English literature. 
 
 William Langland (1332-1400) , John Gower (1325- 
 1408), and Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400), found in 
 them fruitful material for character painting and for 
 sermonising too, and Langland gives us the first really 
 dramatic and artistic presentation of them. The rugged 
 democrat who wrote the " Vision of William con- 
 cerning Piers the Plowman" is a kind of medieval 
 counterpart of Thomas Carlyle, and is certainly as 
 stern a preacher of social righteousness as he. Survey- 
 ing his " field full of folk " he does not fail to see the 
 mischief wrought therein by the Vices of Pride, Envy, 
 Sloth, and the rest ; so he brings them together to
 
 30 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 listen to the preaching of Reason, or Conscience,* 
 and they are powerfully affected thereby and seek to 
 be shriven. 
 
 It is not, however, the influence of Reason and 
 Conscience upon wicked lives that is the most in- 
 teresting part of this episode, though that in itself as a 
 piece of psychological analysis is fine, it is the vivid 
 and terrible pictures of the Sins themselves. They 
 are human incarnations of the moral diseases they 
 represent, and they live and weep and pray and curse 
 before our eyes. 
 
 Personelle, proud heart, cast her to the earth, 
 
 And lay long ere she looked, and lorde Mercy cried, 
 
 And besought Him that us all made, 
 
 She should unsowe her shirt, and set therein an haire 
 
 To tame her flesh that so fierce was to sin. 
 
 A faithful son of the Church, Langland, never in- 
 tentionally attacks any of her fundamental doctrines. 
 He preaches confession and penitence to the Sins, but 
 his path to social reform was by way of personal 
 righteousness, and the Catholic Church, as he knew 
 it, did not make for that. His poem is a great pas- 
 sionate cry of protest against corruption in Church 
 and State. He sees in his vision 
 
 All the wealth of the world and its woe, both, 
 
 and proclaims that it is the ill use made of wealth that 
 causes woe. With the people, and of them, seeing 
 their sufferings, the tyranny of the nobles, and the 
 hypocrisy of the priests, he spoke burning, withering 
 words that went farther than he knew. He saw the 
 
 *In the A text it is the former, in the B text the latter.
 
 THE SINS AND SOCIAL REVOLT 3 I 
 
 Deadly Sins everywhere, but poured scorn on the 
 Pope's remedies of indulgencies and pardons, and put 
 right living before outward forms and sacraments. 
 He taught that wealth, if mis-used, might be taken 
 from its unworthy possessor by the king, and used by 
 him for the people's good. That the monarch, having 
 taken it, might possibly use it for his own good in- 
 stead of the people's never seems to have occurred to 
 him. The passion of the preacher, and the fire of the 
 prophet were in his words, but the fruits they bore in 
 after times had Dead Sea apples amid their ripeness, 
 and sours and bitters mingle with their sweets. 
 
 The entrance of Luxuria gives opportunity for Lang- 
 land to denounce a popular English vice which has 
 stood a good deal of denouncing. He bids the people 
 who work to dine but once and to drink with the 
 duck, in other words to drink water, especially on 
 Saturday, for to be drunken on Saturday night is to be 
 unfit for the duties of the following day. 
 
 The description of Avarice is the most powerful 
 piece of character painting in the poem 
 
 Then came Coveytise, whom I cannot describe, 
 
 So hungry and hollow-eyed he looked. 
 
 He was beetle-browed, and baber lipped 
 
 With his bleared eyes like a blind hag, 
 
 And as a leathern purse lolled his cheeks 
 
 Wider than his chin, and with age he trembled, 
 
 And as a bondman of his bacon his beard was bedrivelled. 
 
 With a hood on his head, and a dirty hat above, 
 
 And in a tawny tabard coat of twelve winters' age, 
 
 All torn and dirty and full of lice creeping. 
 
 Not less hideous is the description of Sloth
 
 3 2 
 
 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 Then came Slothe all beslabred with the slymy eyes ; 
 
 " I must sit," quoth this man, " or else I should sleep, 
 
 I may not stand nor stoop nor without a stool kneel." 
 
 "What ! awake man ! " cried Repentance, "and haste thee to shrifte." 
 
 " If I should die this day I list not to look. 
 
 I know not my paternoster as the priest he it singeth ; 
 
 I can rhyme of Robin Hood, and Randolf Earl of Chester ; 
 
 But our Lord or our Lady, not the least that ever was made. 
 
 I have made vows forty and forgot them in the morn : 
 
 I have performed no penance as the priest me told : 
 
 Right sorry for my sins yet was I never : 
 
 If I tell any beads it is but in wrath, 
 
 And what I tell with my tongue is two miles from my heart."* 
 
 It is John Gower's misfortune that his poetry is 
 the most tedious in the English language. His moral 
 aims were of the highest order ; there is often a deep 
 and earnest sincerity in his words, and he rendered a 
 service to English literature which has been per- 
 manent, inasmuch as he was the first writer of stories 
 in the English tongue, and the first creator of these 
 "moral tales" which have since become so dear to 
 English domestic circles. Devout, cultured, and of up- 
 right life, kind-hearted and wealthy, and with a strong 
 natural bias in favour of the established order of things, 
 John Gower represented, alike in his books and his 
 life, all that was solid and all that was slow-going 
 in the English character. He sympathises with the 
 oppressed peasantry to a very limited extent, and only 
 because the goodness of his nature leads him to sym- 
 pathise with suffering everywhere. He is on the side 
 of the respectabilities, never strays from the beaten 
 
 "Compare Bunyan's town "two miles off from honesty" and the passage in his 
 sermons, "Give me a ballad or a newsbook, George on horseback, or Sir Bevis of 
 Southampton."
 
 eyo fum infeax cxrmtfchta met 
 Lmnr cmm &jl}faj^tej 
 Vcci<6t Jtertttif pvtfivms jxtatS* . 
 
 ENVY. 
 
 (After De Vos.) 
 
 [Page 32.
 
 THE SINS AND SOCIAL REVOLT 33 
 
 path, but ambles along it in steady and decorous fashion, 
 discoursing conventional morality the while with some 
 eloquence and at everlasting length. The Seven Vir- 
 tues and the Seven Sins were at the foundations of 
 all medieval moral teaching, and in two of his books we 
 find much discourse, edifying or otherwise, upon them. 
 
 He wrote three books in French, Latin, and English 
 respectively, and they are entitled "Speculum Medi- 
 tantis," "Vox Clamantis," and "Confessio Amantis." 
 It is in the first and the last that he discourses on the 
 Sins, and in the last we find this conservative country 
 gentleman honestly facing the problem of a social 
 revolution. The peasant's revolt under Wat Tyler 
 and Jack Straw spread over the greater part of the 
 Eastern Counties and being a landed proprietor in 
 those counties, he was in close touch with it. Op- 
 pressed beyond endurance, and ground down by a 
 shamelessly unjust taxation, the peasantry rose in in- 
 surrection. Straw was an ill-balanced and wild- 
 headed man, but Tyler seems to have had some of 
 the qualities of a leader, though, like his followers, 
 no clear view of what was needed in reform. If there 
 had been statesmanship in England in 1381, the rising 
 of the peasants might have brought about a better state 
 of society, but there was none. The young king was 
 profligate and treacherous, and his advisers self-seeking, 
 and a short reign of mob-law was followed by a whole- 
 sale slaughter of the revolters, and the murder of Wat 
 Tyler. 
 
 Gower sought for the causes of the revolt, and found 
 them, as Langland did, in the selfishness of the wealthy
 
 34 T HE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 classes and the corruption of the Church. Writing in 
 Latin, and for the educated classes, his remedy is to 
 recall them to the ancient ideals of the Christian faith 
 from which they had fallen away. He does not spare 
 them in his poem, but he does not fail to point out the 
 shortcomings of the peasants, though none of them 
 could read his words. What he says about them 
 probably had its modicum of truth, but it is pretty 
 much what the well-to-do always say of the working 
 classes when the latter assert their rights. That his 
 words did not miss their mark is shown by the fact that 
 he won a more than English, a European reputation, 
 and was the first English writer whose books were 
 translated into a foreign tongue. On the manuscript 
 of one of them is a drawing showing him shooting his 
 arrow against the world. 
 
 It was not until 1895, that we could say we pos- 
 sessed Gower's works in their entirety. The " Spec- 
 ulum Meditantis" was lost for some two or three 
 centuries, and Prof. Henry Morley, writing in 1888, 
 said : " Of Gower's French poem " Speculom Medi- 
 tantis" no copy can now be found. Some day perhaps 
 a manuscript of it will be discovered abroad in some 
 quiet old monastic library." The manuscript of it 
 was discovered in 1894, but not in a monastery. It 
 was found by the distinguished scholar, Mr. G. C. 
 Macaulay, in the library of Cambridge University. 
 It had been purchased in 1891, at a sale of old manu- 
 scripts belonging to Edward Hailstone, deceased, and 
 given to the library of his University. Mr. Macaulay 
 had occasion to examine it in i 894, and to his intense
 
 THE SINS AND SOCIAL REVOLT 35 
 
 delight was able to identify it as the lost Gower manu- 
 script. He has now edited it with the rest of Gower's 
 works, and the complete edition of Gower was pub- 
 lished by the Clarendon Press in 1898. 
 
 It has always been assumed that the phrase of 
 Chaucer " Moral Gower" had a touch of kindly irony 
 in it, and this may be the fact. But it is at least 
 possible it was kindly commendation from the great 
 artist to the clever and high-minded friend whom 
 he certainly respected and admired. "Give me that 
 there shall be less vice and more virtue for my speak- 
 ing" expresses Gower's aim accurately enough, and 
 from an ethical standpoint there could scarcely be a 
 higher one. And prosy and commonplace though he 
 be, the patriot as well as the poet may be seen in his 
 verse. Dr. Samuel Johnson describes him "as the 
 first of our authors who can properly be said to have 
 written English," and there is no reason for demur- 
 ring to this statement. When he was asked by the 
 young king, Richard II, to write him a new book, 
 Gower was an at an age when a man might be ex- 
 cused for laying down his pen. But the old man's 
 thoughts turned to the speech of his own people, in 
 whose language he had never written yet, and in this 
 his final work he resolves to put aside the learned 
 languages and write in his native tongue. For the 
 young king's sake he writes wisely, and out of his 
 life's experience, of the value and happiness of upright 
 living, as he had known them, and out of the lore of 
 legend and of history he writes of the evil wrought by 
 the Seven Deadly Sins. And with all his prosing they
 
 36 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 lose nothing of their deadliness in his hands. But 
 Richard II. failed him as he failed all good men, and 
 the "Confessio Amantis" became a book written for 
 his country's sake. He determines that he will not 
 in his closing years be too wise or too learned, "for 
 sooth it is" 
 
 That who that al of wisdom writ 
 
 It dulleth oft a mannes wit 
 
 To him that shall it all day rede, 
 
 For thilk6 cause, if that ye rede, 
 
 I wold6 go the middle way, 
 
 And write a booke between the twey ; 
 
 Somewhat of lust, somewhat of lore, 
 
 That of the lass or the more 
 
 Some man may like of that I write : 
 
 And for that fewe men endite, 
 
 In our Englisshe, I thinkd make 
 
 A booke for Englondds sake. 
 
 Fancy and imagination are not unlikely to flag when 
 a poet is within measurable distance of his seventieth 
 year, and John Gower was probably 67 when he began 
 the " Confessio Amantis." But now and again there 
 are pleasant passages, which show that the poet's de- 
 light in nature and natural scenery had not forsaken 
 him with his youth. He is telling the story of Actaeon 
 and Diana, and thus describes the most important 
 episode therein 
 
 So him befelle upon a tide 
 On his hunting he gan ride, 
 In a foreste along he was ; 
 He sigh upon the grend gras 
 The faird freshd floures spring ; 
 He herd among the leves singe 
 The throstle and the nightingale. 
 Thus ere he wist, into a dale
 
 THE SINS AND SOCIAL REVOLT 37 
 
 He came, wher was a litel plaine 
 Al round aboute wel beseine 
 With bushes grene and cedres high, 
 And there within he cast his eye. 
 Amid the plaine he saw a welle 
 So faire there might no man telle, 
 In which Diana naked stoode 
 To bathe and play her in the flood. 
 
 He has no power of character-drawing, he is only 
 a story-teller, with a complete mastery of the art of 
 narrative ; but the following couplet from his descrip- 
 tion of a hypocrite would fit very well on to the 
 descriptions of oily and smooth-spoken frauds, so 
 numerous in our modern poetry and fiction. 
 
 And ever his chere is sobre and softe, 
 And where he goeth he blesseth oft. 
 
 In Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" the Seven Deadly 
 Sins form the subject of the Parson's story, or sermon, 
 the man who is thus described : 
 
 A good man their was of religion, 
 
 That was a poore Parson of a town, 
 
 But rich he was of holy thought and work ; 
 
 He was also a learned man, a Clerk 
 
 That Christes gospel truly would preach ; 
 
 His parishens devoutly would he teach ; 
 
 Benign he was, and wonder diligent, 
 
 And in adversity full patient, 
 
 And such he was yproved often siths ; 
 
 Full loth were him to cursen for his tithe's ; 
 
 But rather would he given out of doubt 
 
 Unto his poore parishens about 
 
 Of his offering, and eke of his substance ; 
 
 He could in little thing have suffisance. 
 
 Wide was his parish, and houses far asunder, 
 
 But he ne left nought for no rain nor thunder, 
 
 G
 
 38 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 In sickness and in mischief to visit 
 
 The farthest in his parish much and lite 
 
 Upon his feet, and in his hand a staff: 
 
 This noble ensample to his sheep he yaf ; 
 
 That first he wrought, and afterwards he taught. 
 
 Out of the gospel he the word^s caught, 
 
 And of this figure, he added yet thereto 
 
 That if gold ruste what should iron do? 
 
 For if a priest be foul on whom we trust, 
 
 No wonder is a lewdd man to rust ; 
 
 And shame it is that if a priest take keep 
 
 To see a " fouled " shepherd and clean sheep : 
 
 Well ought a priest ensample for to give 
 
 By his cleanness how that his sheep should live. 
 
 He sett6 not his benefice to hire, 
 
 And let his sheep accumbred in the mire, 
 
 And ran unto London unto St. Poule's 
 
 To seeken him a chantery for souls, 
 
 Or with a brotherhood to be withold ; 
 
 But dwelt at home and kept6 well his fold, 
 
 So that the wolf made it not miscarry : 
 
 He was a shepherd and no mercenary : 
 
 And though he holy were and virtuous, 
 
 He was to sinful men not dispitious, 
 
 Ne of his speechd dangerous ne digne ; 
 
 But in his teaching discreet and benign. 
 
 To drawen folk to heaven with fairnesse, 
 
 By good example, was his business; 
 
 But were it any person obstinate, 
 
 What so he were of high or low estate, 
 
 Him would he snibben sharply for the nones ; 
 
 A better priest I trow there no where none is. 
 
 He waited after no pomp or reverence 
 
 Ne maked him no spiced conscience : 
 
 But Christe's lore and his apostles twelve 
 
 He taught, but first he followed it himselve. 
 
 It is this man, type and picture of a faithful priest 
 for all time, content to do his duty with quiet manli-
 
 THE SINS AND SOCIAL REVOLT 
 
 39 
 
 ness and find his happiness in learning and virtue, whom 
 Chaucer sets to deal with the seven evil influences which 
 debase mankind. Readers of the "Canterbury Tales" 
 often miss the long prose tractate at the end of the 
 Pilgrimage, thereby losing something of Chaucer's 
 perfect literary art. The pilgrims are finishing their 
 journey, and it has been full of pleasure and of life. But 
 there have been ribald stories told on the way, and if it 
 were like other pilgrimages there may have been some 
 drinking too, and in any case the attitude of the pil- 
 grims' mind could hardly have been that of people who 
 were serious, and ready to pray at the shrine of a saint. 
 And so, as the afternoon shadows lengthen, and even- 
 tide and the ancient city draw near, the parson is asked 
 to contribute a story, and he gives them a sermon on 
 Sin and Repentance. It is unmercifully long, and 
 might almost be regarded as penance as well as ex- 
 hortation, but it doubtless served its purpose, which 
 was to bring back their wandering minds to the object 
 of their quest. 
 
 Actually the sermon is not by Chaucer, but taken 
 by him from a then famous treatise, written in the 
 year 1279 for the use of Philip the Second of France, 
 by a French friar, Frere Lourens or Laurence, and 
 entitled Le Somme des Vices et des Vertues. It is a 
 treatise dealing in a picturesque manner with the 
 duties and dangers of the Christian life, and a large 
 section of it is devoted to a consideration of the Seven 
 Deadly Sins. It is this part of the treatise which 
 Chaucer has borrowed. The Friar, for the purposes 
 of his treatise, finds the origin of the Sins in the vision
 
 40 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 of St. John as described in the Book of Revelation. 
 The mystical number seven is greatly in evidence in 
 the Apocalypse, and in the seven heads of the beast 
 of hell Friar Lourens beholds the Seven Deadly Sins. 
 He follows the metaphor closely, and, in the Ten 
 Horns, and Ten Crowns, and Ten Kingdoms, finds 
 many analogies on which to hang his homilies. The 
 book was translated into the Kentish dialect in the 
 year 1340 by Dan Michel of Northgate, by the title 
 of the "Ayenbite of Inwyt," or "Remorse of Con- 
 science." It is quite probable that Chaucer was familiar 
 with both the translation and its French original, the 
 points of resemblance between both of them and his 
 version are too close to leave much doubt of this, 
 though there is no other evidence. 
 
 In the hands of the Parson on the Canterbury 
 Road, the sermon is full of very illogical but very 
 human utterances concerning sin. Defining and il- 
 lustrating his subject he says: "Every time a man 
 eateth or drinketh more than sufficeth to the susten- 
 ance of his body, it is certain he doth sin, and also 
 when he speaketh more than needeth it is sin, also 
 when he hearkeneth not benignly to the complaint 
 of the poor it is sin, also when he is in health of body 
 and will not fast when he ought to fast, without rea- 
 sonable cause, also when he sleepeth more than need- 
 eth, also when he cometh by the same reason too late 
 to Church or to other works of charity . . . also 
 when he will not visit the sick and the prisoner if he 
 may, also if he love wife or child or other worldly 
 thing more than reason requireth, also if he flatter 
 more than he ought for any necessity, also if he with-
 
 THE SINS AND SOCIAL REVOLT 41 
 
 draw or diminish the alms of the poor, also if he 
 dresseth his meat more delicately than it need, or eat 
 too hastily by greediness, or if he talk vanities at 
 Church, or at God's service, or that he be a talker of 
 idle words of folly, or of villainy, for he shall yield 
 account of it at the day of doom." When he dis- 
 courses on the Deadly Sins themselves, we realise 
 that his sermon is full of poets' English, however it 
 came by its logic. It is Friar Lourens who gives 
 the theme, the figures of speech and the allegorical 
 illustrations are all his, but it is Chaucer who clothes 
 it with words. The sins are described as "Chief- 
 taines of Sins ycleped chieftaines forasmuch as they 
 be chief, and of them springeth all other sins. The 
 roote of these Sinnes is Pride, the general roote of all 
 harmes, for of this roote spring certain branches, as 
 Wrath, Envy, Sloth, Covetousness, Gluttony, and 
 Lechery. And each of these chief Sinnes hath his 
 branches and his twigges." There is much in the 
 exhortation against Pride that recalls the extravagance 
 in dress, prevalent among the wealthy in Chaucer's 
 day, and of the comparative failure of the various 
 sumptuary laws to regulate the extravagance. Among 
 its many definitions, Pride is finely described as "a 
 swelling of the heart." The Sin of Envy follows that 
 of Pride, and the Parson in dealing with the Sins 
 gives some discourse on the remedy for each Sin in 
 turn. This is a departure from the treatise of Friar 
 Lourens, who brings in his remedial exhortations at 
 the end of all. They are very beautiful exhortations 
 to virtue and right living, and are used well by the 
 Parson in his tale. Envy is described in the words
 
 42 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 of St. Augustine as having "two speces," "sorrow 
 at other men's goodness," and "joye at other men's 
 harm." Wrath grows out of envy naturally enough. 
 " In the devil's furnace are forged three cursed ones. 
 Pride that aye bloweth and increaseth the fire by 
 chiding and wicked words, then standeth Envie and 
 holdeth the hot iron on the heart of a man with a 
 pair of long tongs of long rancour." Sloth is a study 
 in decadence, a magnificent analysis of the effects 
 on character of an utterly effortless and careless life. 
 Slowly and surely we see the human sinking back 
 into the bestial and losing all the characteristics which 
 mark off man from his brother the ape. The poet 
 is always ahead of the philosopher. That which was 
 hailed as a new discovery in the nineteenth century 
 was seen by the poetic and religious mind of the four- 
 teenth, and described the more dramatically, because 
 it was but seen through a glass darkly reversion to an 
 original type. 
 
 In all popular religious books of this period the Sins 
 are greatly in evidence, but popular religious writings 
 are seldom literature. The Sins are treated sometimes 
 as a whole, and in their relations to each other, and 
 sometimes separately. The fact that they fit in so 
 exactly with the religious and penitential system of 
 the Catholic Church has been used as a suggestion 
 that the Sins were an invention of that Church. But 
 the truth is they were facts of experience familiar to 
 every man and woman who knew life, and the busi- 
 ness of the Church was to set its spiritual ideals over 
 against material facts, show the consequences of each, 
 and bid mankind choose.
 
 WRATH. 
 
 (After De Vos.) 
 
 [Pane 42.
 
 THE SINS AND SOCIAL REVOLT 43 
 
 In "Old English Homilies," in "Aelfric's Homilies," 
 in the " Cursor Mundi," in Robert of Brunne's " Hand- 
 lyng Sinne," and in the "Mirror of St. Edmund," 
 references to the Seven Deadly Sins are numerous; and 
 the episode of Dante, "Purgatorio," Book II., rest- 
 ing on a terrace in Purgatory, and having the whole 
 penitential system of the Church explained to him by 
 Virgil, introduces us to the Sins in other literature than 
 our own. The following passage from a thirteenth 
 century poem, which has been ascribed to Dante, and 
 has been rendered into English by Plumptre, shows 
 very completely the spiritual aspect of the idea. 
 
 In Pride the root of every sin doth lie ; 
 Hence man himself doth hold in loftier frame 
 Than others, and deserving lot more high. 
 
 Envy is that which makes us blush for shame, 
 
 With grief beholding others' happiness, 
 
 Like him, whom we the face of God proclaim. 
 
 Wrath still more woe doth on the wrathful press, 
 For its fierce mood lights up hell's fiery heat ; 
 Then ill deeds come, and loss of holiness. 
 
 Sloth looks with hate on every action meet, 
 
 And to ill-doing ever turns the will, 
 
 Is slow to work, and quick to make retreat. 
 
 Then Avarice comes, through which the whole world still 
 Vexes its soul, and breaks through every law, 
 And tempts with gain to every deed of ill. 
 
 Both fool and wise foul Gluttony doth draw, 
 And he who pampers still his appetite, 
 Shortens his life, to fill his greedy maw. 
 
 And Lust that comes the seventh in order right, 
 The bonds of friendship breaks and brotherhood, 
 At variance still with Truth and Reason's light.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Sins in Common Life. 
 
 THERE is no popular literature of the Middle Ages 
 extant, which quite corresponds to the religious 
 plays in influence over the lives of the common people : 
 but the man who, outside the plays, was the great 
 moving force in religious England of the fourteenth 
 century was John Wycliffe (1325-1384?), and there 
 is in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, a MS. re- 
 puted to be by him on the Seven Deadly Sins. It is 
 of parchment, six-and-a-half by four-and-a-half inches 
 in diameter, in small handwriting, containing thirty- 
 two lines to a page. It is catalogued as "WiclifFs 
 Tracts: The Creed and the Seven Deadly Sins," and 
 the evidence as to its authorship was sufficient to sat- 
 isfy Dr. Thomas Arnold, and to cause him to include 
 it in his "Select English Works of WyclifFe." But 
 Wycliffe had all the qualities and literary methods of 
 a successful journalist, and if he lived to-day would 
 almost certainly be a leader writer for the popular 
 press, whereas this treatise especially if it is read by 
 the side of the prose treatise of Chaucer is deadly 
 dull. Even WyclifFe's name, supposing it to be by 
 him, could hardly have made it popular, and we have 
 to look elsewhere to trace the influence of the Sins 
 in common life.
 
 THE SINS IN COMMON LIFE 45 
 
 In the year 1493 there was published in Paris a 
 remarkable volume entitled "Le Compost et kalen- 
 drier des bergiers," which ten years later (1503) was 
 translated into English at the cost of Richard Pynson 
 by the title of "The Kalendar of Shepherds." It 
 was a most popular book in France, and it speedily 
 became popular in England, and there is no wonder 
 in this, for it is perhaps one of the most interesting 
 books which the fifteenth century produced. The 
 name of its author, or authors, is unknown, but 
 they possessed the gift of writing on serious matters 
 in a popular style, and the book is written by devout 
 Catholics ; ultimately for the good of humanity, but 
 primarily in the interests of the Catholic Church. It 
 is full of shrewd worldly wisdom, and not of the 
 baser sort, of an imagination that is at once simple 
 and strong, and of ideals of life that are robust and 
 straightforward. It is written for all and sundry, 
 but very special emphasis is laid on the necessity for 
 instructing "lay folk." "This book," says the pre- 
 face, "is very profitable, both for Clerks and lay 
 people, to cause them to have a greater understanding, 
 and in especial in that we be bound to learn and know 
 on pain of everlasting death." It is a compilation of 
 information concerning this world and the next, deals 
 with equal wisdom and fulness with the needs of the 
 body and the needs of the soul, and does not fail to 
 show, in lurid and terrible fashion, the punishment 
 that follows the commission of the Seven Deadly Sins. 
 
 It begins in allegorical form by telling simply and 
 prettily the following story of a shepherd. " Here 
 
 H
 
 46 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 before time was a shepherd, keeping his sheep in the 
 fields, who was no clerk, nor understood any manner 
 of scripture or writing, but only by his natural wit. 
 He sayeth that living and dying are all at the will 
 and pleasure of Almighty God. And he sayeth that 
 by the course of nature a man may live three score 
 years and twelve, or more. For every man is thirty- 
 six years old before he come to his full strength and 
 virtue. And then he is at the best, both in wisdom 
 and also in seriousness, and discretion. For by thirty 
 six years, if so be that he have not good manners then, 
 it is unlikely that ever he shall have good manners 
 after while he live. 
 
 "Also likewise as a man is waxing and growing 
 thirty-six years, so it is given him as many more to 
 incline and go from the world by the gift of nature. 
 And they that die before they be three score and 
 twelve years old, oft-time it is by violence or outrage 
 of themselves, and they that live above that term, it 
 is by good government and good diet. 
 
 "The desire of this shepherd was to live long holily 
 and die well. But this desire of long life was in his 
 soul, which he hoped to have after death. For the 
 soul shall never die, whether it be in bliss or pain. 
 
 "Therefore this shepherd thought that seventy-two 
 years here in this vale of wretchedness, is but a little 
 and a small term to the life everlasting, which shall 
 never have ending. 
 
 "And he sayeth he that ofFereth himself here to 
 live virtuously in this world, after this life he shall 
 receive the sweet life that is sure, and lasteth ever 
 without end. For though a man lived here a hundred
 
 THE SINS IN COMMON LIFE 47 
 
 years or more, it is but a little term to the life to 
 come. Therefore, says this shepherd, I will live soberly 
 with these small temporal goods that Jesus hath lent 
 me, and ever exile the desire of worldly riches and 
 worldly worship. For they that labour for these and 
 have a love to their goods, oft it deprives them of the 
 heavenfy treasure. It shutteth man's heart that God 
 may not enter, and builds man a place of no rest in 
 the low land of darkness." 
 
 This passage is followed by some wise discourse 
 by the "master shepherd." It is not clear whether 
 this person is meant to typify God, or simply a sage 
 and kindly elder man : in the illustrations he is re- 
 presented as a priest of high degree, but whoever 
 he is meant to be, he is full of varied wisdom, and 
 discourses with equal fluency on the four seasons, 
 the twelve months of the year, the calendar and all 
 that appertains thereto, the fixed and moveable festi- 
 vals of the Church, the golden numbers and how to 
 find them, the signs of the Zodiac, the changes of the 
 moon, eclipses, physiology, botany, astronomy, and 
 the doctrines of the Christian faith. In short, the 
 "Kalendar of Shepherds" contains the information of 
 an almanack, a book of medicine, and a religious ency- 
 clopaedia besides, all written and arranged in a popular 
 but in no sense a vulgar or commonplace way. Humour 
 there is, but of the sly and kindly order, as the following 
 lines on eclipses will show : 
 
 An eclipse shall be marvellous to behold, 
 Through which many shall be the worse, 
 For they shall find neither silver nor gold, 
 It shall be so dark within their purse.
 
 48 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 It is in the second part of the "Kalendar" that 
 religious matters are dealt with, and like Chaucer the 
 authors go straight to Friar Lourens for information 
 about the Seven Deadly Sins. There are two treatises 
 on the Sins, one in prose, and one rhymed. The 
 prose is, so far as they are concerned, a translation of 
 Lourens ; the rhymed treatise, terribly long, but much 
 the most interesting of the two, appears to be based on 
 the prose one. It is all simply unblushing plagiarism. 
 Everything is "lifted" shamelessly and nothing is 
 acknowledged, and the only thing to be said in de- 
 fence is that sometimes very good use is made of the 
 stolen material. But it is probable that no thought 
 of anything dishonest was present to the medieval 
 mind in matters of literary "conveyance" like this. 
 It may well have been that they regarded common 
 truths as common property, and took passages out of 
 religious treatises pretty much as modern religious 
 writers take passages from the Bible, on the assump- 
 tion that most of their readers will know where the 
 passage occurs. 
 
 The old metaphor of the tree, its branches and 
 twigs, was always excellent for didactic purposes, and 
 perhaps it is improved in this "Kalendar" by being 
 put into rhyme. The following brief preface is used 
 to introduce the Deadly Seven : 
 
 "In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, 
 we purpose to show the Vices, and moreover of sinners 
 to understand their sins, the which is divided in seven 
 principal parts, after the Seven Deadly Sins, and each 
 Deadly Sin is likened to a tree, and every tree having
 
 THE SINS IN COMMON LIFE 49 
 
 seven small branches, and all these seven trees cometh 
 out of one tree by itself that is yellow, and cometh of 
 one beginning and that is of the delight, and it bides 
 an end that is everlasting damnation, which is or- 
 dained for them that seek not remedy betimes by 
 penance and repentance by their life in time and hour. 
 And hereafter followeth the tree of Vices, the pains 
 of hell, to show the lay people what punishment is 
 ordained for every Deadly Sin, and the people may 
 the better show their Sins in confession, and make 
 clean their conscience, that they may be the home of 
 God, so that Virtues may grow and fructify to the 
 profit of your souls." 
 
 The enumeration of the branches of each tree is 
 curious, and in reading the rhymed exhortations to 
 righteousness, we cannot fail to see that on its moral 
 and spiritual side the philosophy of life taught by the 
 medieval church, if occasionally simple, is thoroughly 
 sound and healthy, and wherever it was lived up to must 
 have created pure women and manly men. Lourens, 
 from whom the whole spirit of the treatises in the 
 "Kalendar" comes, wrote in the thirteenth century, 
 a period which some present day scholars of emin- 
 ence are acclaiming as one of the greatest centuries 
 in European history. The Tree of Pride has seven- 
 teen great branches and endless small "sprigs and 
 sprays." Envy has thirteen branches, and the first two 
 are indicated here, as in Chaucer's "Parson's Tale," 
 by the passage from St. Augustine "To desire thy 
 neighbour's harm, to be glad of thy neighbour's ill 
 name." Wrath has ten branches; Sloth seventeen,
 
 50 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 out of which a hundred and thirty smaller branches 
 grow. Covetousness has twenty, Gluttony five, and 
 Lechery five. The presentation of vital truths in 
 simple language, rather than originality, is aimed at in 
 the homilies on the various phases of Christian dogma 
 or faith. Lourens is laid largely under contribution 
 for everything, and the old French friar must certainly 
 have possessed one of the finest intellects of his century 
 to have been such a source of religious inspiration and 
 helpfulness for more than three hundred years. 
 
 Following the rhymed chronicle of the Sins, there 
 comes this curious and homely piece of rhyming which 
 again brings in the fatal seven, and which is called "a 
 remembrance of the instability of the world." 
 
 Would every man bethink on his beginning 
 From whence he came and whereunto he shall, 
 Then would they serve alike both duke and king 
 And every lord both great and small. 
 Little wot they when they sit on their bench, 
 When Death will come, and off it make them fall ; 
 Away from him they may not ever wrench, 
 Though he be the greatest lord of all. 
 And for as one thing to thy mind call ; 
 Trust not thy wisdom nor thine heir, 
 But do well here whate'er befall, 
 For this world is but a chery fare. 
 
 But well were he that were so wise, 
 That could be ware ere he be woe, 
 He were a man of full great price 
 In this world that could do so. 
 We wax now so worldly nice 
 We cast our wits full far us fro, 
 Like to a player at the dice, 
 We wot not well whereto to go
 
 THE SINS IN COMMON LIFE 5! 
 
 Would we beware of the fiend our foe 
 Lest that he should our souls apayre. 
 Let us beware ere we be woe 
 For this world is but a chery fare. 
 
 It hath ever been seen by day and night 
 Oft a long time here beforne, 
 There knoweth not the king nor knight 
 Whether he shall live till morn. 
 To-day though he be whole and light, 
 And hunteth both with hound and horn, 
 When he is man most in his might, 
 In a short time thy life has gone. 
 For on thy bier when thou art borne, 
 Thou climbest then a slender stair ; 
 Let thy good deeds, man, go beforne, 
 For this world is but a chery fare. 
 
 This world now-a-days is ill to trust, 
 
 For Covetise walketh about so wide, 
 
 And to all other sins is over Lust, 
 
 Both Envy and Sloth, Lechery and Pride. 
 
 And Simony full sweet is kissed 
 
 And on high horses doth ride. 
 
 Some locketh him full fast in his chest 
 
 And sets it night to his bed's side. 
 
 But the day shall come they shall curse the tide, 
 
 Both baron, burgess, priest and mayor, 
 
 That ever they did that time abide, 
 
 For this world is but a chery fare. 
 
 Where is thy treasure, there's thy mind, 
 
 So saith thy gospel if thou look : 
 
 Alack men why be to Jesus so unkind, 
 
 To love so much a little muck, 
 
 And all that shall thou leave behind, 
 
 Though thou love ravening as a rook ; 
 
 Goods of this world make many blind 
 
 And the fiend then taketh with many a crook.
 
 52 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 Now Jesus who Mary to thy mother took, 
 That was ever clearest under the air, 
 Thou wash us in thy merciful brook, 
 For this world is but a chery fare. 
 
 There is much in the "Kalendar" which can be 
 read as a plea for a simple life. The shepherd in his 
 meadows piping to his sheep, is held by the authors 
 to have a better chance of human happiness than the 
 courtier or the pleasure seeker. No suggestion is how- 
 ever made that mere pleasant environment is sufficient 
 to create good life : the sins can be anywhere ; the 
 shepherd may admit them to his hut, or the king 
 to his palace, and the consequence will be the same 
 in either place. A tremendous emphasis is laid on 
 personal responsibility always and everywhere, even 
 in merely secular ills. Health and holiness seem often 
 interchangeable terms, and a man gets credited occa- 
 sionally with the cause of his illness, as he does with 
 the guilt of his sin. There is much common sense in 
 the book, but it is not simply common sense, it is 
 touched often with a fine imagination. 
 
 Of the various editions of the "Kalendar" Mr. 
 Heinrich Oskar Sommer, whose reprint published in 
 1892 is a veritable treasure to the collector of rare books, 
 enumerates thirty-eight in French and English, but 
 is of opinion that not more than two-thirds of the 
 editions that were published have come down to us. 
 Four were published in Paris, and one in Geneva be- 
 tween 1493 an d 1 5 ; seven are known to have been 
 published in Paris, four in Lyons, four in Troyes, one 
 in Rouen, and ten in London during the sixteenth
 
 THE SINS IN COMMON LIFE 53 
 
 century ; one in Paris and five in London in the seven- 
 teenth century ; other editions were published at Troyes 
 in 1705 and 1729. Of the edition in the Bibliotheque 
 Nationale, Paris, printed on vellum in the year 1 500 by 
 Guiot Marchant, Mr. Sommer says " It is one of the 
 finest books ever produced." The "Kalendar" be- 
 longs to the domain of literary archaeology, but it has 
 enough of quaint homely wisdom, religious feeling, 
 and old-world humour, as well as the elusive element 
 of charm, to make another reprint desirable in the 
 interest of the reading world. 
 
 The tree metaphor was largely used by artists, and 
 pictures of the Seven Deadly Sins as the seven branches 
 of a tree whose roots grew in the pit of hell, were not un- 
 common on the walls of English churches, though very 
 few of them remain now. The fanaticism of the seven- 
 teenth century, and the whitewash of the eighteenth, 
 destroyed much that was of historic or of antiquarian 
 interest in our parish churches, and many a quaint and 
 curious picture of the Sins may lie hidden under lime- 
 wash. Some sixty years ago there was found in Cat- 
 field Church a picture of the tree of the Seven Sins. 
 It was, as usual, whitewashed over again, but an en- 
 graving of it was made for the Norfolk Archaeological 
 Society. The picture shows a tree rising out of the 
 mouth of Hell. Hell's mouth is represented by a pair of 
 open jaws, well toothed, and not unlike the mouth of a 
 gigantic whale. It was the ordinary method of pic- 
 turing Hell's mouth in the Middle Ages, and it lasted 
 well on to the eighteenth century, and may be found 
 in old editions of popular books like the "Pilgrim's
 
 54 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 Progress" or "Drelincourt on Death." The seven 
 branches are seven fiends ; in the mouth of each 
 is a sinner, about whose waist a chain is bound, at 
 which other devils, who are standing in Hell's mouth, 
 are tugging vigorously, apparently to show that the 
 sinner will only escape from the bondage of the Sin to 
 fall into the mouth of Hell below. At Crostwright 
 Church and at Brooke Church, also in Norfolk, and 
 at Ingatestone Church, Essex, pictures of the Sins 
 are under the whitewash on the walls. At Arundel 
 Church, Sussex, there is a picture representing the 
 Sins in the seven spokes of a wheel, and there are also 
 some frescoes (whitewashed) of them in the chapel of 
 the Guild of the Holy Cross, Stratford-on-Avon. 
 
 It is to the Church pictures and the minor writers 
 that we must go to find out the place of the Sins in 
 the religion of the peasant, the artisan, and the serf; 
 and this is seen very completely in a poem entitled 
 " Instructions to Parish Priests," published by the Early 
 English Text Society, and written in the fifteenth cen- 
 tury. Its author is one, John Myrc, who was himself 
 a parish priest in Shropshire during the latter half of 
 that century. It is, so he informs us, not his own 
 work, but a translation of a Latin work called " Pars 
 Oculi." There is no reason to doubt his statement, 
 but the original has not been discovered. Whoever 
 was its author, he was a wise and kindly-hearted man. 
 Reading, it is easy to see that the good parish priest 
 of the Middle Ages was not essentially different from 
 the good parson of the present day. He was the guide, 
 philosopher, and friend of the people among whom he
 
 THE SINS IN COMMON LIFE 55 
 
 lived. He had to face such problems as bad housing 
 and over-crowding, and the sleeping of growing boys 
 and girls in the same room ; and he talked to his 
 parishioners about them pretty much as Kingsley 
 might have done. It is a popular notion that what 
 have been called the "Dark Ages" were choked with 
 superstition. Superstition will always be found in 
 some form or other, given the necessary tempera- 
 mental conditions, but it is probable there was not 
 more superstition in the fifteenth century than in the 
 seventeenth or eighteenth, only it was of a different 
 character. And certainly there is almost none in the 
 poem of John Myrc. The social life of the medieval 
 parish, as well as its religious and ethical standards, 
 are revealed in "The Questions on the Seven Deadly 
 Sins." If this parish is to be taken as typical, things 
 were neither better nor worse in English villages in 
 the fifteenth century than they are to-day. There 
 were fewer people, and certainly fewer books, but the 
 religious standards were as high, and the moral ones 
 not appreciably lower than those of our own century. 
 The poem begins by instructing the priest what he 
 must learn, and how he must live himself, before he 
 undertakes to teach others. This is followed by a 
 system of moral and religious teaching which covers 
 the whole of life from the cradle to the dying bed. 
 Some simple and practical instructions are given to 
 the midwife concerning her duties at the birth of the 
 child and the baptism of it, should the necessity arise, 
 by her, as well as the form of words to be used in the 
 baptismal ceremony. The words are : " Ego baptizo
 
 56 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 te N., in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti. 
 Amen." But she is free to use the English words if 
 she can speak no Latin. 
 
 English or Latin whichever be saith 
 It sufficeth for the faith. 
 
 Following baptism comes confirmation, with wise 
 advice to young men and maidens, which was in all 
 probability not better followed than advice of the same 
 character is to-day ; and then marriage and an ex- 
 position of doctrine and the duties of life. The 
 teaching of the "Instructions" in all that relates to 
 individual character, social duty, and the responsibilities 
 of citizenship, leaves little to be desired if we remem- 
 ber the ideals which then obtained. 
 
 Another side of social life is shewn in the instruc- 
 tions as to hearing confession and the methods of the 
 confessional, and it is a very simple and homely life 
 indeed. 
 
 When anyone hath done a sin, 
 Look he lives not long therein ; 
 But anon that he him shrive, 
 Be it husband, be it wife, 
 Lest he forget by Lenten's day, 
 And out of mind it go away. 
 
 Priest and people appear to live in close kinship, 
 without arrogance on the one side or servility on the 
 other ; and outside the sphere of religious duties there 
 is a suggestion of pleasant equality between the shep- 
 herd and his flock. Facts are faced frankly in questions 
 on sensual Sins, and given the confessional as a re- 
 ligious institution it is difficult to see how it could
 
 THE SINS IN COMMON LIFE 57 
 
 have been better conducted than along the lines laid 
 down in Myrc's "Instructions." An examination on 
 breaches of the ten commandments follows the ques- 
 tions as to soundness of doctrine ; and the penitent is 
 then examined on the Seven Deadly Sins. 
 
 Of Deadly Sins now also 
 I will ask now ere thou go. 
 Therefore, son, spare thou nought 
 To tell how thou hast them wrought. 
 
 Pride is the foundation Sin from whose root all 
 other Sins spring, and to it, therefore, is given the 
 largest share in the "shrift father's examination." Is 
 the penitent a boaster, making proclamation of his 
 good deeds, or fraudulent, having appropriated the 
 good deeds of others ? Has he, for the sake of getting 
 honour from man, disparaged or oppressed his neigh- 
 bour ? Is he vain of his personal beauty, his apparel, 
 or his worldly possessions, and has he treated con- 
 temptuously those who lack these things? Is his 
 pride spiritual, does he boast his virtue or his holiness ? 
 All these things are manifestations of the Deadly 
 Sin of Pride, and must be purged by contrition and 
 penance. From Pride the priest passes to Sloth, and 
 the questions on this Sin scarcely suggest anything 
 very deadly. Has he been slow to come to church, 
 has he hindered others coming, slept during sermon 
 time, been loth to fast, slow to go on pilgrimage, to 
 teach children or to do works of charity ? The last 
 two questions are of importance, and the neglect of 
 the duties to which they refer can fairly be classified 
 as deadly ; but in dealing with other manifestations of
 
 58 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 this sin the writer seems to have missed his aim. It 
 is quite easy to see the ill consequences that may spring 
 either from spiritual, mental, or bodily sluggishness, 
 and the use a wise confessor could have made of advice 
 on these things; but the time is frittered away on what 
 are, after all, minor aspects of the Sin of Sloth. The 
 very questions dealing with Envy, show us the smaller 
 vices of society as they are in every age. Speaking ill 
 of people whom we dislike, and whose good fortune 
 we are envious of, is a sin that is always with us ; and 
 in the havoc it can make of human happiness may be 
 deadly indeed. It is the savage side of man that is un- 
 veiled in the questions concerning Wrath; in Gluttony 
 and Lechery the beast stands revealed ; and Avarice, 
 grey haired and grasping, is scarcely human in his 
 hideousness. Only a priest, well grounded in the prin- 
 ciples of his faith, could have retained belief in human 
 nature at all if his experience brought him much into 
 contact with phases of life like these. 
 
 In a poem entitled the " Mirror of the Period of 
 Man's Life," printed by the Early English Text 
 Society from a manuscript in the library of Lambeth 
 Palace, written probably about the same time asMyrc's 
 tractate, the Sins appear as persons, and no longer as 
 mere influences. They act as direct tempters of man, 
 the story of whose entry into the world is told in a 
 finely imaginative passage. 
 
 In a winter night ere I waked 
 In my sleep I dreamed so ; 
 I saw a child mother-naked 
 New born the mother fro (from),
 
 ',corra/ts druta, 27 
 tatfr apgs/eftyfr &t*n et mops 
 radix TtOfrgHt 
 
 CO VETO USN ESS. 
 (After De Fos.) 
 
 58.
 
 THE SINS IN COMMON LIFE 59 
 
 All alone as God him maked ; 
 In the wildernesse he did go 
 Till the governance he taked 
 An angel friend, an angel foe. 
 
 It is a child of the middle classes to whom we are 
 thus introduced, with money at his command, and as 
 manhood comes on he may live his life pretty much 
 as he will. At twenty we see him between two 
 counsellors, Reason and Passion, and the Seven Deadly 
 Sins are waiting at the door. 
 
 Quoth Reason, " In age of twenty years 
 Go to Oxenforde or learn the law : " 
 Quoth Lust, "Harp and giterne may ye lere 
 And pricked staff and buckler wherewith to play, 
 At taverne to make women merry cheer, 
 And wild fellows together draw." 
 
 His fortunes are followed from the age of twenty 
 to that of a hundred, and as the poem passes from 
 stage to stage the reader is reminded a little of the 
 "Seven Ages," of Shakespeare, but the distant re- 
 semblance is certainly accidental, as the poem was in 
 manuscript and there is no evidence that Shakespeare 
 ever read it. The picture of age, when all the Sins 
 save Sloth and Covetousness have left the man, is full 
 of dramatic pathos and power, as the various stages 
 of advancing years are depicted. 
 
 Now I am sixty years and ten 
 Young folk I find my foe, 
 Wherever they play or leap or run, 
 They say that in their way I go ; 
 And when I meet with old men, 
 I playne this world is changed so.
 
 60 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 Now four score years have passed 
 My life is but travail and woe, 
 For I into rereage am cast 
 Into ten years and mo. 
 
 Now am I under Fortune's wheel 
 My friends forsake me every one, 
 And all the sins I loved so well 
 Now well I wot have been my doom. 
 
 Mine age is now a hundred year ; 
 Little I drink, and less I eat, 
 On my back I bear my bier, 
 And all my friends do me forget. 
 
 The Virtues, which were ever pleading in his soul, 
 lead him to seek Divine mercy, and bring him peace 
 at last, and the hell hounds which " bark and bite," and 
 the phantom of " Wanhope," a quaintly poetic name 
 for Despair, are banished for ever, and we are asked to 
 
 Pray for the soul that wrote this tale 
 
 A pater noster and an ave 
 
 To Mary mother, maiden free, 
 
 Who bare a child to comfort us ; 
 
 On that soul have pity 
 
 If the will be of Christ Jesus. 
 
 Another fifteenth century poem entitled "Give me 
 Lysens to live at ease" is of a different and so far as 
 the religious spirit of it is concerned of a more exalted 
 kind. It is the cry of a tortured Soul that desires to 
 follow the paths of righteousness, but cannot by reason 
 of the Seven Evil Influences. 
 
 To live at ease, thy lawes to keep, 
 Grant me grace, Lord, in bliss so bright 
 That I may never in that cabin creep 
 That Lucifer locks in withouten light.
 
 THE SINS IN COMMON LIFE 6 1 
 
 They are all there in their order, and the Soul must 
 needs do battle with them if it would "live at ease." 
 The little poem has a haunting pathos, as have all 
 poems of storm and stress, but there is nothing great 
 in it, and it is probably the work of a monkish minor 
 poet, full of religious and poetic feeling, but with no 
 touch of the divine fire. 
 
 K
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 The Sins and the Reformation. 
 
 A TRUE history of the social and religious up- 
 heaval which Englishmen call the Reformation 
 yet remains to be written, but one of its most clearly 
 defined phases is that of a revolt against symbolism 
 and allegory of every kind, a revolt against permanent 
 and natural human instincts. If the Reformers were 
 often sincere and loyal souls, ready to die for an idea 
 in which they believed, whether it were right or 
 wrong, they were often, too, utterly ignorant people 
 in conflict with ideas they did not understand. They 
 were not lovers of liberty, though their principles 
 made for it, and they gave no liberty to any who 
 thought otherwise than they did. Their intellectual 
 vision was narrower, their religious philosophy less 
 human, and their imaginative outlook coarser and 
 more crude in all its conceptions than that of the re- 
 ligion whose teaching they repudiated, and whose 
 wholesome solid social life they overthrew. A bitter 
 intolerance was the dominant spirit of the time, and 
 the Reformers often represented that spirit in its 
 lowest and most unlovely form. Religious differences 
 converted neighbours and relatives into spies on each 
 others' actions. John Foxe records how the charming 
 pages of the "Kalendar of Shepherds" were made by
 
 THE SINS AND THE REFORMATION 63 
 
 Catholics an instrument of religious intolerance and 
 persecution. "In 1519, John Edmunds, otherwise 
 called John Ogins of Burford, did detect Philip Bra- 
 bant, servant of Richard Collins, for saying that the 
 sacrament of the altar was made in remembrance of 
 Christ's own body, but was not the body of Christ. 
 'The Shepherd's Kalendar' was also accused and de- 
 tected, because the same Edmunds said that he was 
 persuaded by this book, reading the words 'That the 
 sacrament was made in remembrance of Christ." 
 Froude, who was an enemy to the Catholic Church, 
 has said ; "To the Universities the Reformation had 
 brought with it desolation. To the people of England 
 it had brought misery and want. The once open hand 
 was closed ; the once open heart was hardened ; the 
 ancient loyalty of man to man was exchanged for 
 scuffling and selfishness; the change of faith had 
 brought with it no increase of freedom and less of 
 charity. The prisons were crowded with sufferers 
 for opinion, and the creed of a thousand years was 
 made a crime by a doctrine of yesterday." Hallam, 
 a Protestant to the core, has said with equal force and 
 directness : " Persecution is the deadly original sin of 
 the reformed churches ; that which cools every honest 
 man's zeal for their cause, in proportion as his reading 
 becomes more extensive." 
 
 But it has to be admitted that the Catholic Church, 
 which had been supreme in England for a thousand 
 years, was content to see great masses of men and 
 women grow up in ignorance around it, and there is 
 no evidence that it made any effort to do even the
 
 64 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 elementary duties of a Church towards them, and 
 teach them the first principles of its own faith. It is 
 the appalling ignorance of the people concerning the 
 faith of their own Church that is so striking at this 
 time : plays, poems, sermons, and public speeches all 
 bear evidence of this ignorance, and yet the time was 
 full of intellectual energy. The Catholic Church 
 had no opponents in its own sphere when the Refor- 
 mation began, and the spiritual life of the nation was 
 entirely in its hands ; that it came to be regarded with 
 hatred or with ignorance, is the most damning evi- 
 dence that can be produced of its failure as a spiritual 
 force. It embodied in its teaching a larger concep- 
 tion of life, and finer and more magnificent idealism, 
 than anything the Reformed religions could show, 
 and yet people turned from it to the dry bones of 
 Protestantism, and went cheerfully to the fire rather 
 than to the nation's ancient faith. Rightly or wrongly, 
 they held that the ecclesiastical system under which 
 they had lived for centuries had deceived them ; that 
 it was a fraud and a lie. The newer faith, which so 
 many loyal souls held to be the river of the water of 
 life, was at its best but a turbid and muddy stream ; 
 but the people of England chose it for their drinking 
 because they believed there was poison in the ancient 
 river. Why these things were history has not fully 
 shown. The Protestant hatred of Rome is based largely 
 on prejudice and ignorance, but the Catholic Church 
 must purge herself of many stains and evils before she 
 can stand justified before the tribunal of history. 
 
 That the allegorical and mystical presentation of the 
 Sins should suffer change when all round was changing
 
 THE SINS AND THE REFORMATION 65 
 
 was inevitable, but it lingered long in the imagination 
 after it ceased to have the sanction of faith. And how- 
 ever deep the revolt against symbolism in religion, no- 
 thing could banish it from literature, and here we may 
 trace it ; if in a lesser degree as a moral influence, re- 
 maining as a literary form for yet a couple of centuries 
 to come. 
 
 Stephen Hawes (1483-1523), courtier and poet, 
 and chiefly courtier, in an allegory called the " Pastime 
 of Pleasure," published in 1506, has many "Sevens" 
 among his allegorical personages. There are seven 
 sciences, and the beast with the seven heads (manifestly 
 from the Apocalypse), upon whose seven crowns are 
 inscribed the names Delay, Dissimulation, Discomfort, 
 Variance, Envy, Distraction, and Doubleiiess; but the 
 Sins in their church order nowhere appear. The 
 book has material in it that has probably been used by 
 the compilers of popular fairy stories of a later time. 
 Giants with numerous heads, enchanted castles, and 
 magic horns, are mixed up curiously with pagan legends 
 and the verities of the Christian faith, and there are 
 passages in it so closely resembling the " Pilgrim's 
 Progress" as to make it certain that Bunyan whose 
 reading was certainly wider than popular biographers 
 make out was familiar with its pages. Hawes is 
 perhaps only remembered now by the following coup- 
 let, which, it has been conjectured, was not his own, 
 but a popular utterance which he appropriated and 
 polished up : 
 
 For though the day be never so long, 
 At last the bells ringeth to evensong.
 
 66 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 If he is the man of culture writing poetry, rather 
 than the poet, he is frankly, and withal modestly, 
 conscious of the fact, as the following lines from the 
 prologue to the "Example of Virtue" show. He is 
 a disciple who gives fullest reverence to his masters : 
 
 O prudent Gower ! in language pure 
 Without corruption, most facundious ! 
 
 O noble Chaucer ! ever most sure 
 Of fruitful sentence right delicious ! 
 
 O virtuous Lydgate ! much sententious ! 
 Unto you all, I do me excuse, 
 
 Though I your cunning now do use. 
 
 Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester (1485-1555), 
 among the many good stories with which he gar- 
 nishes his sermons, has a story relating to the Sins. 
 It was told to bring ridicule on the Romish clergy, 
 and no doubt served its purpose well. "I will tell 
 you now," said Latimer, "a pretty story of a friar to 
 refresh you withal. A limitor of the gray friars in 
 the time of his limitation preached many times, and 
 had but one sermon at all times, which sermon was of 
 the ten commandments. And because this friar had 
 preached this sermon so often, one that heard it before 
 told the friar's servant that his master was called Friar 
 John Ten Commandments ; whereupon the servant 
 showed the friar his master thereof, and advised him 
 to preach of some other matters, for it grieved the 
 servant to hear his master derided. Now the friar 
 made answer saying, 'Belike then thou knowest all 
 the ten commandments well, seeing thou hast heard 
 them so many times.' 'Yea,' said the servant 'I war-
 
 THE SINS AND THE REFORMATION 67 
 
 rant you.' 'Let me hear them,' saith the master. 
 Then he began, 'Pride, Covetousness, Lechery,' and 
 so numbered the sins for the ten commandments." 
 Latimer makes no other reference than this to the 
 Sins in their numerical arrangement, but has a good 
 deal to say about mortal and venial sins, and, sturdy 
 protestor against Rome though he was, here advocates 
 strongly and clearly the Roman doctrine. 
 
 The Seven Deadly Sins are once more in the hands 
 of genius when we meet them in the poetry of William 
 Dunbar (1450?-! 520?). The range, power and fear- 
 lessness of Dunbar's genius entitle him to rank with the 
 greatest English writers of the fifteenth century : in 
 his own country he has rarely, if ever, been sur- 
 passed by poets of any age. His genius is of an 
 entirely different type to that of Robert Burns, and 
 no direct comparison can be instituted between them. 
 But in the possession of qualities which make up the 
 finest poetry, he is always the equal and not seldom 
 the superior of the great peasant poet. Historically 
 he is little more than a shadow. He was probably 
 born in the year 1450 ; it is conjectured that he died 
 in 1520. His name is entered on the registers of St. 
 Andrew's University as a Bachelor of Arts in 1477. 
 From his birth it would appear that he was intended 
 for the Church, as in one of his poems is found the 
 following lines : 
 
 I was in youth on nurse's knee 
 "Dandely bischop, dandeley," 
 And when that age now does me grip 
 Ane simple Vicar I cannot be.
 
 68 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 He took the Master's degree in 1479, and appar- 
 ently after some wild and licentious years became a 
 Franciscan Friar. He says the devil made him one; 
 if so Satan must be credited with excellent judgement. 
 There was never a priest with less of unreality or cant, 
 never a friar who lashed more pitilessly the vices of 
 his order or his time. Apparently he was a man of 
 eloquence, visiting as a preacher both England and 
 France, and preaching in Canterbury Cathedral. He 
 was a constant attendant at the Court of James IV, 
 was patronised by the Queen Margaret, who was sister 
 to Henry VIII, was in receipt of royal bounty, and 
 had said mass before the King. But he lashed the 
 vices of the Court with as much zest as he did those 
 of the Church ; perhaps that is why, with all his royal 
 friendships, he never obtained a benefice worth the 
 having. His poetry is instinct with fire and passion; 
 but, human to the very heart of him though he is, 
 his passion never overmasters his judgement. Hating 
 with bitter and relentless hatred all that was false and 
 unreal in the Church to which he belonged, he yet 
 never confuses the ideal with the lapses from it of its 
 false professors. There is no more terrible realisation 
 of the dramatic possibilities of the Sins in all literature 
 than is found in the Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins 
 by William Dunbar. Even Marlowe in his handling 
 of the same subject is not the equal of the poet priest. 
 The dance takes place in the streets of Hell on the eve 
 of Ash Wednesday. The devil, who is called Mahoun, 
 an old way of designating the fiend in the middle ages, 
 calls for a dance on the last day before Lent, and the
 
 THE SINS AND THE REFORMATION 69 
 
 Sins dance and make mirth in Hell, as if they knew 
 their power and might laugh the prayer and penitence 
 of mankind to scorn. When the peals of hellish laugh- 
 ter cease, and the dance of Hell has ended, by a strange 
 mad turn of incident the poem resolves itself into an 
 attack on the party Dunbar hated, and ends with what 
 in the hands of a smaller man would have been buf- 
 foonery, but in Dunbar is an exhibition of fierce savage 
 humour, perhaps weakened a little by party spite. The 
 poem must speak for itself. 
 
 Of Februar', the fifteenth night, 
 Full long before the dayes light, 
 I lay in till a trance ; 
 
 And then I saw both Heaven and Hell. 
 Methought, among the fiendes fell, 
 Mahoun gart cry a Dance 
 Of Shrewes that were never shriven, 
 Against the Feast of Fastern's Even, 
 To make their observance. 
 
 He bade gallants go graith a Guise ; 
 And cast up gambols to the skies, 
 That last came out of France. 
 
 "Let see," quod he, "now who begins?" 
 With that, the foul Seven Deadly Sins 
 Began to leap at once : 
 
 And first of all in dance was Pride, 
 With hair wyld back and bonnet on side, 
 Like to make waste wanis ; 
 And round about him, as a wheel, 
 Hung, all in rumples, to the heel, 
 His cassock for the nonce. 
 
 Many a proud trompeur with him tripped ; 
 Through scalding fire, aye, as they skipped, 
 They groaned with hideous groans.
 
 70 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 Holy harlots in haughty wise, 
 Came in, with many a sundry guise ; 
 But never laughed Mahoun 
 
 Till priests came in, with bare shaven necks ; 
 Then all the fiends laughed, and made geeks, 
 Black Belly and Bawsy Brown. 
 
 Then, Ire came in with sturt and strife, 
 His hand was aye upon his knife, 
 He brandished like a bear. 
 
 Boasters, braggarts, and Bargainers, 
 After him, passed in to pairs, 
 All ready in feir of war. 
 In jacks, and scrips, and bonnets of steel, 
 Their legs were chained to the heel, 
 Forward was their affeir : 
 
 Some, upon other with brandes beft ; 
 Some jagged others to the heft, 
 With knives, that sharp could shear. 
 
 Next, in the Dance, followed Envy, 
 Filled full of feud and fellony, 
 Hid malice and despite ; 
 
 For privy hatred that traitor trembled ! 
 Him followed many freke dissembled, 
 With feigned wordes white ; 
 And Flatterers to men's faces, 
 And Backbiters of sundry races, 
 To lie that had delight ; 
 
 And Rowners of false leasings. 
 Alas ! that Courts of noble Kings 
 Of them can never be quit ! 
 
 Next in the Dance, came Covatice, 
 Root of all evil, and ground of vice ; 
 That never could be content ! 
 Cowards, wretches, and okerers, 
 Misers, hoarders, and gatherers, 
 All with that warlock went ! 
 Out of their throats, they shot on other[s] 
 Hot molten gold, methought, a fodder,
 
 tr , efj&iu&(a. 
 u. aa> -prtecmfef dot, t&t&c 
 'etfo vufffiif : ry&fauper 
 immet&tjuxrptio jmt*. rift 
 
 GLUTTONY. 
 (After De Vos.) 
 
 [Page 70.
 
 THE SINS AND THE REFORMATION Jl 
 
 As lightning most fervent : 
 
 Aye, as they emptied them of shot, 
 Fiends filled them anew up to the throat, 
 
 With gold of all kinds (of) print. 
 
 Then Sloth that at the second bidding 
 Came like a sow out of a midden, 
 Full sleepy was his face. 
 
 Many a lazy stupid glutton, 
 And slattern daw and sleepy sloven, 
 Him served aye with sounyie. 
 He drew them forth in till a chain, 
 And Belial with a bridle rein, 
 Ever lashed them on the lunyie. 
 
 In Dance they were so slow of feet, 
 They gave them in the fire a heat ; 
 And made them swift of counyie. 
 
 Then, Lechery, that loathly corse, 
 Came neighing like a bagit horse; 
 And Idleness did him lead. 
 
 There were with him an ugly sort, 
 And mony stinking foul tramort, 
 That had in sin been dead. 
 When they were entered in the Dance, 
 They were full strange of countenance, 
 Like torches burning red. 
 
 Then, the foul monster Gluttony, 
 Of womb insatiable and greedy, 
 To dance he did him dress. 
 
 Him followed mony foul drunkard, 
 With can and collop, cup and quart, 
 In surfeit and excess. 
 Full many a waist-less wallydrag, 
 With wames unwieldy, did forth wag, 
 In grease that did increase. 
 
 Drink ! aye they cried with many a gape. 
 The fiends gave them hot lead to lap ; 
 Their thirst was none the less.
 
 72 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 No Minstrels played to them, but doubt ! 
 For Gleemen there, were holden out 
 By day and eke by night ; 
 
 Except a Minstrel that slew a man ; 
 So till his heritage he wan, 
 And entered by Brief of Right. 
 Then cried Mahoun for a Highland Pageant ; 
 Syne ran a fiend to fetch Makfadyane, 
 Far northward in a nook. 
 
 By he the Coronach had done shout, 
 Erschemen so gathered him about, 
 In Hell great room they took. 
 
 Those termagants with tag and tatter, 
 Full loud in Ersche began to chatter ; 
 And roup like raven and rook. 
 
 The Devil so deafened was, with their yell, 
 That in the deepest pit of Hell, 
 He smothered them with smoke. 
 
 A curious antiquary, Mr. J. Chalmers, has calculated 
 that the only years in Dunbar's lifetime when Shrove 
 Tuesday fell on February 15, were 1496, 1507, and 
 1518, and hazards a guess that the poem must have 
 been written in one of the first two years. 
 
 Dunbar brings us to the eve of the Reformation, 
 when men's minds were beginning to change in their 
 attitude towards the Sins. The comedy as well as 
 the tragedy of evil had always been present to the 
 medieval imagination, but it was the comedy rather 
 than the tragedy that was present to the imagination of 
 this new world which was to supersede the old. "The 
 Devil is an Ass " said Ben Jonson, and experience with- 
 out the aid of argument would easily prove that the 
 sinner is always a fool. But the problem of evil was 
 passing out of the hands of the priests, if not of the
 
 THE SINS AND THE REFORMATION 73 
 
 theologians, and influenced by the teaching of Calvin 
 was to take horrible and inhuman forms, under whose 
 sway noble natures became base, and generous souls 
 exchanged their generosity for a creed that libelled 
 God and man. The Seven Deadly Sins, by reason of 
 their close correspondence with the facts of life, as 
 well as by their appeal to the imagination and to the 
 mystical side of human nature, were to hold their 
 place among those whose imagination remained un- 
 tramelled by the subtleties of a theological rather than 
 a religious time. The old problem typified by the 
 Sins stirred men's hearts ; but it was taking another 
 and a darker aspect, and was discussed sometimes with 
 faith and hope, sometimes with savage and inhuman 
 rancour, and sectarian bitterness : 
 
 Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, 
 Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute 
 And found no end in wandering mazes lost."
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The Sins and the 'Elizabethans. 
 
 THE group of men who were gathered together 
 at the Court of Elizabeth, and who gave character 
 and personality to the most glorious years of her glo- 
 rious reign, are entirely unique in our history. We 
 detect no shadow of them before that reign began : 
 they pass away with its ending. They seem to spring 
 into life as if at an enchanter's bidding ; they were 
 born of a new passion which England had never felt 
 before, the passion for nationality and freedom. Eliza- 
 beth felt this new passion, and her people knew it ; 
 hence their loyalty to and worship of their queen. 
 What they believed in she believed in too ; she lived 
 their life, and became to them an ideal of perfect 
 queenliness and perfect womanhood. Fulsome and 
 grotesque as many of the utterances of the Elizabethan 
 poets to their royal mistress seem to-day, they were 
 true and real then, and represented the devotion and 
 affection with which the finest spirits of her nation 
 regarded her. The exquisite lines of George Peele 
 
 Blessed be the hearts that wish my sovereign well, 
 Cursed be the souls that think her any wrong, 
 
 found an echo in the hearts of his fellow-countrymen. 
 There is a strange sense of youthfulness in these strong 
 men as we look on their pictures and read their acts
 
 THE SINS AND THE ELIZABETHANS 75 
 
 i 
 
 and words. They were a group of hot-blooded imagi- 
 native boys, who fought the fights and sang the songs 
 of one of the most glorious epochs through which the 
 world has ever passed ; but they were masters of the 
 spiritual forces that were moulding England's life, and 
 their strength was born of the freedom which came to 
 them as a new heritage, full of glorious possibilities, as 
 manhood comes to aspiring youth. 
 
 But great though the epoch was to the life of the 
 nation, it brought evil times for the Catholic Church, 
 and for those who still held to its faith. That Church 
 was reaping as it had sown. Its Popes had for a century 
 and more been no spiritual fathers to Englishmen, but 
 simply foreign princes who sweated their revenues 
 and their people where they could, and filled English 
 bishoprics with foreign nominees. Englishmen, per- 
 haps the majority, held to the ancient faith till that faith 
 and its representatives seemed to be a danger to the life 
 of the nation, and then new knowledge and newer 
 thought made alliance with national feeling and neces- 
 sity, and combined for its overthrow. But its leading 
 ideas lived on, though its ecclesiastical system was dis- 
 credited, and Protestantism, in spite of its vauntings 
 about the Bible, drew its highest spiritual inspirations 
 from the Catholic Church. Catholic allegory lived, 
 though it took other forms ; and the Seven Deadly 
 Sins, if they held no theological significance for the 
 Elizabethans, remained as an imaginative asset, which 
 had by no means lost its value. 
 
 In the hands of Richard Tarlton, the famous Court 
 jester and comedian of Elizabeth's days, the Sins formed
 
 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 matter for mirth rather than homily. But all that is 
 left of what he wrote concerning them is the famous 
 "Platt" among the MSS. of Dulwich College, and 
 this tells us practically nothing. We have a glimpse 
 of John Lydgate, of Henry VI, and other dramatic 
 personalities ; and the Seven Sins cross and recross the 
 stage with no apparent reason, for there is not even a 
 foreshadowing of any coherent story or possibility of 
 saying what the play was like from the skeleton that 
 remains. Tarlton died in 1588, and this was the year 
 of the production of Marlowe's "Tamburlaine the 
 Great." The ancient faith of England was being 
 exposed to ridicule on all sides, and it was but natural 
 that the Sins should share the scorn that was being 
 poured on doctrines more vital to catholic truth than 
 they were. It is in Marlowe's "Faustus" that the 
 Seven Deadly Sins make their last appearance in 
 drama, and "Faustus" may very well be called the 
 last of the mystery plays. In form and spirit it greatly 
 resembles them, and notwithstanding the reputation 
 of its author for atheism, is an intensely religious 
 play. Mephistophilis is an incarnation of the power 
 of evil, and at times scoffs bitterly at goodness and 
 virtue. But at other times he preaches with an elo- 
 quence and a fervour which would have done credit 
 to any of Elizabeth's bishops. The Sins are in their 
 natural enviroment in "Faustus," but it is the comedy 
 of evil that they present, and we laugh at them with 
 a hearty full-blooded mirth, for there is no touch of 
 the hideousness or the horror with which they were 
 clothed by the earlier poets. The laughter of Marlowe
 
 THE SINS AND THE ELIZABETHANS JJ 
 
 is human laughter at human folly ; there is laughter in 
 Dunbar too, but it is the laughter of the fiends in hell. 
 The Sins appear in the second scene of the first act 
 of "Faustus," and are introduced very befittingly by 
 Mephistophilis. 
 
 Beelzebub. Now, Faustus, question them of their names and dis- 
 positions. 
 
 Faust. That shall I soon. What art thou, the first ? 
 
 Pride. I am Pride, I disdain to have any parents. I am like to 
 Ovid's flea, I can creep into every corner of a wench, sometimes like 
 a periwig I sit upon her brow, next like a necklace I hang about her, 
 then like a fan of feathers I kiss her, and then turning myself to a 
 wrought smock do what I list. But fie, what a smell is here ! I'll 
 not speak a word more for a king's ransom, unless the ground be per- 
 fumed, and covered with cloth of arras. 
 
 Faust. Thou art a proud knave indeed what art thou, the second ? 
 
 Covet. I am Covetousness, begotten of an old churl in a leathern 
 bag, and might I now obtain my wish, this house, you and all should 
 turn to gold that I might lock you safe into my chest. O my sweet 
 gold! 
 
 Faust. And what art thou, the third ? 
 
 Envy. I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster 
 wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burned. I 
 am lean with seeing others eat. O that there would come a famine 
 over all the world, that all might die, and I live alone, then thou 
 should'st see how fat Fid be ! But must thou sit, and I stand ? Come 
 down with a vengeance. 
 
 Faust. Out envious wretch ! But what art thou, the fourth ? 
 
 Wrath. I am Wrath : I had neither father nor mother : I leapt 
 out of a lion's mouth when I was scarce an hour old ; and I have 
 been ever since running up and down the world with this case of 
 rapiers, pounding myself when I could get none to fight withal. I 
 was born in hell, and look to it, for some of you shall be my father. 
 
 Faust. And what art thou, the fifth ? 
 
 Glut. I am Gluttony, my parents are all dead, and the devil a 
 penny they have left me but a small pension: and that buys me thirty 
 meals a day and ten beevers, a small trifle to suffice nature. I come 
 
 M
 
 78 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 of a royal pedigree, my father was a gammon of bacon, and my 
 mother was a hogshead of claret wine; my godfathers were these, 
 Peter Pickled Herring and Martin Martlemas Beef, but my God- 
 mother, oh ! she was an ancient gentlewoman, her name was Margery 
 March-beer. Now Faustus thou hast heard all my progeny, wilt 
 thou bid me to supper? 
 
 Faust. Not I. 
 
 Glut. The devil choke thee. 
 
 Faust. Choke thyself, Glutton. What art thou, the sixth ? 
 
 Sloth. Heigho ! I am Sloth. I was begotten on a sunny bank. 
 Heigho ! I'll not speak a word more for a king's ransom. 
 
 Faust. And what art thou, Mistress Minx, the seventh and last ? 
 
 Lechery. Who, I Sir ? I am one that loves an inch of raw mutton 
 better than an ell of fried stockfish, and the first letter of my name 
 begins with Lechery. 
 
 Lucifer. Away to hell, away. On ! piper. 
 
 [Exeunt the Seven Sins. 
 
 Edmund Spenser (i 552 ?- 1599), is the next poet 
 who introduces us to the Seven Deadly Sins, and his 
 verse contains and conveys in fullest measure the spirit 
 of the Elizabethan age. With Marlowe it is other- 
 wise, and we are continually conscious in his writings 
 of that other world of thought and feeling with which 
 he was constantly at war, and out of which he was 
 slowly and painfully emerging. He had deeper sym- 
 pathies with it than he knew, in spite of many wild 
 utterances of revolt, and would certainly have realised 
 them had he lived to mature years. But his life ended 
 before his youth, and he remains the glorious but 
 strangely erratic morning star of Elizabethan poetry, 
 shining on the old thought and the new alike, but 
 loving the old even while he, with all a boy's un- 
 reasoning passion, poured scorn upon it. But Spenser 
 lived in the newer world, and was of it as well as with
 
 THE SINS AND THE ELIZABETHANS 79 
 
 it. He had no quarrel with the older faith and its 
 forms as Marlowe had ; for him it was too far off to 
 quarrel with, and in dealing with the Sins he no longer 
 payed regard to the mystical number seven, but re- 
 duced the number to six, making the seventh per- 
 sonage in the group Satan himself. 
 
 The Six Sins are the counsellors of the "foul Duessa," 
 and it is a generally accepted theory that by Duessa 
 Spenser meant Mary Queen of Scots. No external evi- 
 dence exists in support of it, but the internal evidence 
 is strong and conclusive, and if we accept it, places the 
 poet in a different light to that in which he is generally 
 regarded. Mary Stuart represented in her own person 
 all the ideas and principles with which Spenser as .a 
 typical Protestant Englishman was at war. That she 
 is at the head of the procession of Deadly Sins seems 
 to show that he meant her to take the place of Pride, 
 the foundation sin of all the rest. But though Mary 
 could maintain herself with royal dignity, if necessity 
 demanded, pride was hardly the dominant element in 
 her character ; indeed it was more manifest in Eliza- 
 beth than in her rival. Mary could be tender, gracious 
 and womanly when she chose, and these were qualities 
 in which Elizabeth did not excel. Neither Una, as 
 a representation of Queen Elizabeth, nor Duessa as 
 Mary Queen of Scots, is a triumph of allegorical art. 
 According to Gabriel Harvey the first book of the 
 "Faerie Queen" was written in 1580, and the ex- 
 ecution of the Queen of Scots did not take place till 
 1587. It is in Book I, Canto iv, that we meet the 
 procession of the Deadly Sins, and there too occur the
 
 80 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 passages which form the only unclean spot in Spenser's 
 perfect and beautiful verse. 
 
 The "Roiall dame," who "for her coach doth call," 
 is drawn therein by "six unequal beasts" on which six 
 of the Sins are mounted, the first of them being our old 
 friend Sloth under his Spenserian name of Idleness : 
 
 The nourse of sinne 
 Upon a slothful asse he chose to ryde, 
 Arrayed in habit black and amis thin, 
 Like to an holy Monck, the service to begin. 
 
 '9 
 
 And in his hands his portesse still he bore 
 That much was worne, but therein little redd, 
 For of devotion he hadd little care, 
 Still drown'd in sleep and most of his daies dedd 
 Scarce could he once uphold his heavie hedd, 
 To looken whether it were night or day ; 
 May seem the wayne was very evil ledd, 
 When such an one had guiding of the way 
 That knew not whether right he went or else astray. 
 
 2O 
 
 From worldly cares himself he did esloyne, 
 
 And greatly shunned manly exercise ; 
 
 From every work he challenged essoyne, 
 
 For contemplation's sake : yet otherwise 
 
 His life he led in lawless riotise, 
 
 By which he grew to grievous malady : 
 
 For in his lustlesse limbs, through evil guise, 
 
 A shaking fever raged continually; 
 
 Such one was Idlenesse, first of this company. 
 
 There is nothing that is new in Spenser's description 
 of Sloth. All its details are medieval, and it only 
 differs from other word-pictures of the same vice in 
 the form of the verse. It is otherwise with Gluttony.
 
 P I GUTTIA 
 
 SLOTH. 
 (After De Vos.) 
 
 (Page 80.
 
 THE SINS AND THE ELIZABETHANS 8 I 
 
 He is classical rather than medieval, a drunken bac- 
 chanal rather than an incarnate Vice. The description 
 of him is disgusting enough, and savours nothing of 
 the purity which marks other portions of Spenser's 
 verse. Little touches of poetic beauty amid details 
 of debauchery and disease hardly serve to redeem the 
 picture from utter loathsomeness. 
 
 In greene vine leaves he was right fitly clad, 
 For other clothes he could not weare for heate; 
 And on his heade an yvie garland had, 
 From under which fast trickled downe the sweat 
 Still as he rode he somewhat still did eat, 
 And in his hand did beare a bouzing can. 
 
 Lechery is a much more difficult character to depict 
 than Gluttony, and it cannot be said that Spenser's 
 delineation of this sin is a very considerable success. 
 It was largely the custom to make Lechery a woman, 
 but he reverses this, and makes him a man who "of 
 ladies oft was loved deare," a reflection upon feminine 
 morality common among Elizabethan poets. He is 
 clad in a "greene gowne," a colour given to Jealousy 
 and to the Evil One, but not very much to Lechery, 
 by the poets. He delights "weake women's hearts to 
 tempt," and with all the scurf of his moral leprosy 
 thick upon him, yet seems to obtain considerable suc- 
 cess in his temptings. 
 
 In his picture of Avarice, Spenser rises considerably, 
 and almost reaches to the level of William Langland 
 in the same character. He gives his imagination free 
 play, and is full of originality, vivid picturesqueness, 
 and power.
 
 82 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 And greedy Avarice by him did ride, 
 
 Upon a camel loaden all with gold ; 
 
 Two iron coffers hong on either side 
 
 Witli precious metal full as they might hold : 
 
 And in his lappe an heap of coins he tolde ; 
 
 For of his wicked pelfe his God he made, 
 
 And unto hell himselfe for money sold ; 
 
 Accursed usury was all his trade, 
 
 And right and wrong ylike in equal ballance waide. 
 
 His life was nigh unto death's dore yplaste, 
 And threadbare cote, and cobled shoes hee ware ; 
 Ne scarse good morsell all his life did taste, 
 But both from backe and belly still did spare, 
 To fill his bags, and richesse to compare ; 
 Yet child ne kinsman living had he none 
 To leave them to ; but thorough daily care 
 To get, and nightly feare to lose his owne, 
 He led a wretched life unto himselfe unknown." 
 
 In this description of Avarice we have a first sketch 
 of a character common in fiction and on the stage a 
 hundred years later ; the miser. Glimpses of him are 
 seen in the plays of Ben Jonson, but he does not really 
 reach his full development till the eighteenth century. 
 But his origin is here, in the aimless helpless love of 
 the yellow earth for its own sake, and not for anything 
 it could give or do ; a sordid vice which half wins our 
 pity while it wholly excites our repulsion. The miser 
 appears but rarely in either modern fiction or modern 
 drama : no one has drawn him successfully since Scott 
 depicted miser Trapbois, and Trapbois is a lineal 
 descendant of the Avarice of the Sins. The Vice he 
 stands for has only taken other forms, not departed 
 from our midst. In stanza thirty Envy is described,
 
 THE SINS AND THE ELIZABETHANS 83 
 
 riding upon a wolf and chewing with his teeth "a 
 venemous tode," while in his bosom lurks a snake. 
 
 He hated all good workes and vertuous deeds, 
 And him no less that any like did use ; 
 And who with gratious bread the hungry feeds, 
 His almes for want of faith he doth accuse. 
 So every good to bad he doth abuse ; 
 And eke the verse of famous Poets' witt 
 He does backbite and spightful poison spues 
 From leprous mouth on all that ever writt. 
 
 In the "verse of famous poets' witt" it cannot be 
 doubted that there is a personal touch. Even in the 
 "spacious times" poets were an envious race, as 
 Spenser knew full well. "Fierce revenging Wrath," 
 riding upon a lion, carries memories of earlier poetic 
 conceptions ; the description of him casting forth 
 from his eyes "sparkles fiery red" and fingering his 
 knife is reminiscent of William Dunbar : perhaps the 
 most Spenserian verse in the whole description of the 
 Sins is the final one, which pictures Satan driving 
 them all before him with the lash of his whip. 
 
 And after all, upon the wagon beame, 
 
 Rode Sathan, with a smarting whip in hand, 
 
 With which he forward lasht the laesy team, 
 
 So oft as Sloth still in the mire did stand, 
 
 Huge routs of people did about them band, 
 
 Shouting for joy ; and still before their way 
 
 A foggy mist had covered all the land : 
 
 And underneath their feet all scattered lay 
 
 Dead sculls and bones of men whose life had gone astray. 
 
 With all the fine human touches, Spenser's concep- 
 tion of the Sins is less original, and the creatures of 
 his fancy less human than the impersonation of them
 
 84 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 given by any of his predecessors, and this of itself 
 marks the beginning of the change. The sins were 
 no longer the cancers of a poisoned soul, they were 
 losing their reality and had no place in the moral per- 
 spective of the Elizabethan mind. They belonged 
 to the "superstitions of popery;" and to the poet, they 
 could hardly have been more than abstractions, use- 
 ful for literary purposes, but having little ethical value. 
 Spenser's coarse and violent attack on helpless Mary 
 Queen of Scots (in the character of Duessa) is a blot 
 on his great epic. The passage occurs in stanzas 
 45-50 of Canto viii, Book I, of the "Faerie Queen." 
 It describes, with abundance of loathsome detail, the 
 treatment of Duessa when she becomes the captive of 
 Una and the Redcross Knight, and the parallel be- 
 tween this incident and the captivity of Mary at the 
 hands of Elizabeth is too obvious to be regarded as 
 accidental. 
 
 45 
 
 Henceforth, Sir Knight, take to you wonted strength 
 
 And maister these mishaps with patient might. 
 
 Loe where your foe lies stretcht in monstrous length ; 
 
 And loe ! that wicked woman in your sight, 
 
 The roote of all your care and wretched plight, 
 
 Now in your powre, to let her live or die. 
 
 "To doe her die" (quoth Una) "were despight, 
 
 And shame t' avenge so weake an enimy ; 
 
 But spoil her of her scarlot robe, and let her fly." 
 
 46 
 
 So as she bad, that witch they disaraid, 
 And robd of roiall robes and purple pall, 
 And ornaments that richly were displaid ; 
 Ne spared they to strip her naked all.
 
 THE SINS AND THE ELIZABETHANS 85 
 
 Then, when they had despoyld her tire and call, 
 
 Such as she was their eies might her behold, 
 
 That her misshaped parts did them appall ; 
 
 A loathly wrinkled hag, ill-favoured, old, 
 
 Whose secret filth good manners biddeth not be told. 
 
 47 
 
 Her crafty head was altogether bald, 
 And, as in hate of honorable eld, 
 Was overgrown with scurfe and filthy scald ; 
 Her teeth out of her rotten gums were feld, 
 And her sour breath abhominably smeld ; 
 Her dried dugs, lyke bladders lacking wind, 
 Hong downe, and filthy matter from them weld ; 
 Her wrizled skin, as rough as maple rind, 
 So scabby was that would have loath'd all womankind. 
 
 48 
 
 Her neather parts, the shame of all her kind, 
 My chaster Muse for shame doth blush to write ; 
 But at her rompe she growing had behind 
 A foxes taile, with dong all fowly dight. 
 
 The point about these horrible verses is that they 
 represented with perfect accuracy the feeling of Eng- 
 lishmen towards the Scottish Queen, and there is 
 nothing in them that would not have won applause 
 from the most chivalrous of Elizabeth's gallants. 
 When all has been allowed for the excited state of 
 the public mind, its attitude towards Mary Stuart 
 was barbarous, savage, and inhuman. Her offences 
 concerned her own people not us. She had sought 
 shelter in England and had found a prison ; that she 
 should have used every means possible to regain her 
 liberty was no crime in a captive. Whatever sins 
 had stained her early life were more than atoned for 
 
 N
 
 86 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 by her long years of captivity. Mary Stuart, de- 
 fenceless, alone, and with a whole nation against 
 her, ought to have moved the pity of every generous 
 heart. The final scenes of her life set in a lurid and 
 horrible light the popular religion. The prayer of 
 the Dean of Peterborough on the scaffold when Mary 
 was preparing to die was an exhibition of brutality 
 that would have disgraced a Grand Inquisitor, but no 
 one in England cried shame on him for tormenting a 
 woman in her dying moments, when she was trying 
 to make her peace with God. The following passage 
 from the registers of the Church of St. Christopher- 
 le-Stocks, London, will illustrate another phase of the 
 same wave of popular passion and of moral degradation 
 which had swept across the minds of the English 
 people. " Item, paid for ringing when Babington and 
 other traytors were apprehended and when the Queen 
 of Scotts was beheaded." The concluding word has 
 had a pencil drawn through it, as if the hideousness 
 of the original entry had stirred some conscience when 
 the whole ghastly business was at an end, but the fact 
 remains that the English people lit bonfires, danced 
 and made merry, because a wretched captive, after 
 nineteen years of durance, had been butchered under 
 the form of law, and insulted in her last moments for 
 remaining faithful to that which a couple of genera- 
 tions before was the religion of the nation. 
 
 In a poem entitled "Tom Tell Troth's Message,'* 
 written by John Lane and published in 1600, the 
 Sins appear in processional order ; but there is nothing 
 original in their description, everything being imi-
 
 THE SINS AND THE ELIZABETHANS 87 
 
 tated or borrowed from Spenser. We may perhaps 
 except the picture of Drunkenness, which, however, 
 is remarkable for little but revolting detail. Lane's 
 poem was written in the lifetime of Elizabeth, who 
 kept her Court free from all the grosser vices. Had 
 it been written six years later, when James I enter- 
 tained the King of Denmark, the disgusting picture 
 of female drunkenness which he paints might have 
 been seen among the masquers : Sir John Harrington 
 at least relates that when Faith, Hope, and Charity, 
 appeared before their Majesties, Hope was so intoxi- 
 cated as to be well-nigh speechless, Faith was in a 
 staggering condition, Charity had to hurry out of the 
 hall as quickly as might be, and the goddess Victory 
 "was laid asleep on the outer steps of the ante- 
 chamber." 
 
 Samuel Rowlands, a third-rate, but exceedingly 
 popular humorist who began his literary career in 
 the closing years of Elizabeth's reign by writing 
 sacred poetry, from which later he passed to light 
 verse, in which popular vices of the grosser sort are 
 humourously and realistically depicted, has a short 
 poem entitled "The Seven Deadly Sins, all horsed 
 and riding to Hell." It is found at the close of a 
 series of satirical pamphlets entitled "The Four 
 Knaves," and as the pamphlets were very popular 
 among all classes it is apparent that the idea of the 
 "Seven Deadly Sins" retained its meaning and power 
 of appeal. The pamphlet was probably published in 
 1612, and frequently reprinted before Commonwealth 
 days, when it seems to have been suppressed. The
 
 80 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 ride of the Sins to Hell is told in vigorous rhyme, 
 but the metaphors are all the well-worn ones of the 
 older writers, the only new touch being that Cove- 
 tousness is represented as riding on an elephant. 
 
 Covetousness doth backe an elephant ; 
 
 He of his wealth and mony still doth vaunt, 
 
 And counts his poore (though honest) neighbour base, 
 
 (Although farre richer then himselfe in grace). 
 
 God he neglected for the love of gold, 
 
 His soule for money every day is sold ; 
 
 To scrape and get his care is, night and day, 
 
 And in a moment Death takes all away. 
 
 For Shakespeare (1564-1616) the Sins had no dra- 
 matic value. He has one direct reference to them, 
 but simply a passing one, in the play of "Measure for 
 Measure," and an indirect reference in the play of 
 "Henry VIII" (if he wrote the passage in which it 
 occurs). In "Measure for Measure," Act III. Scene i. 
 there is a powerful dramatic episode in which Claudio 
 urges his sister Isabella to give up her virtue at the 
 solicitations of Angelo, in order that her brother's life 
 may be spared. It is youth facing death, and his argu- 
 ment is very human if not particularly Catholic. The 
 Sin under consideration is, of course, Lechery, and of 
 it he says : 
 
 Sure it is no sin ; 
 Or of the deadly seven it is the least. 
 
 Not so would the monks and the fathers of the Church 
 have argued, but Shakespeare is not presenting Claudio 
 as a Catholic, but as a young man to whom life is fair 
 and sweet. Shakespeare really had no intimate know- 
 ledge of the Catholic Church, though it is often urged
 
 THE SINS AND THE ELIZABETHANS 89 
 
 otherwise by non-Catholics. He had the faculty, which 
 any man of energy and determination may have in some 
 degree, of getting a swift and complete practical know- 
 ledge of any subject he desired to know, and he had 
 it in supreme measure. The secret of his seemingly 
 omniscient knowledge must be found in his universal 
 genius. That is a power which is among the mysteries 
 of nature, and cannot be created by environment or 
 education, and in that power the world has not seen 
 his equal. In " Henry VIII," Act III. Scene ii., there 
 is the episode in the fall of Wolsey, where it would ap- 
 pear that the foundation Sin of Pride is referred to 
 under the name of Ambition : 
 
 Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away Ambition ; 
 By that sin fell the angels : how can man then, 
 The image of his Maker, hope to win by it. 
 
 Six of the Sins appear, but under classical names, 
 in that curious poetical allegory the "Purple Island," 
 written by Phineas Fletcher (i 585?-! 650). He was 
 a parish priest who, in addition to being a good minor 
 poet, possessed an accurate knowledge of the science 
 of his day. The "Purple Island" is man, physical 
 and spiritual. The World, the Flesh, and the Vices 
 attack man, and Fido, Faith, is defender. The alle- 
 gory is confused and incoherent, but it has occasionally 
 fine poetic passages. The old battle between Sense 
 and Soul is fought, largely on the old lines, but there 
 are other enemies besides the Deadly Seven. Heresy 
 is there, and Schism ; nameless Vices become incarn- 
 ate, and altogether it is "a vagrant rout" which man-
 
 90 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 kind in Fletcher's verse has to encounter. Dichostasis, 
 or Schism, is very manifestly the Church of Rome. 
 
 A mitre trebly crowned the impostor wore ; 
 For Heaven, Earth, Hell, he claims with lofty pride ; 
 Not in his lips but hands two keys he bore, 
 Heaven's doors and Hell's to shut and open wide ; 
 But late his keys are marred or broken quite. 
 
 The imagery of the poem is involved and unequal 
 like the poem itself. There are passages full of strength 
 and fire, and there are others which are best described 
 by the modern term "sugary." Elizabethan quaint- 
 nesses and conceits abound ; the atmosphere is arti- 
 ficial and without life, and its moments of reality are 
 rare. Echoes of Langland, and a very full imitation 
 of Spenser are found in the description of Covetous- 
 ness, whom the author has named Pleonectes. 
 
 Next Pleonectes went, his gold admiring, 
 His servant's drudge, slave to his basest slave : 
 Never enough, and still too much desiring : 
 His gold his god, yet in an iron grave 
 Himself protects his god from noisome rusting : 
 Much fears to keep, much more to lose his lusting, 
 Himself and golden god and everyone mistrusting. 
 
 Age on his hairs the winter snow had spread ; 
 
 That silver badge his near end plainly proves : 
 
 Yet as to earth he nearer bows his head, 
 
 So loves it more: for "Like his Like still loves": 
 
 Deep from the ground he digs his sweetest gain, 
 
 And deep into the earth digs back with pain : 
 
 From Hell his god he brings, and hoards in Hell again. 
 
 His clothes all patched with more than honest thrift, 
 And clouted shoes were nailed, for fear of wasting : 
 Fasting he praised, but sparing was his drift ; 
 And when he eats his food is worse than fasting.
 
 THE SINS AND THE ELIZABETHANS 9! 
 
 In the description of Envy there is a touch of 
 originality and Elizabethan vigour, even though Spen- 
 ser had said all that could be said on this particular sin. 
 
 Envy the next, Envy with squinted eyes; 
 
 Sick of a strange disease, his neighbours' health ; 
 
 Best lives he then, when any better dies ; 
 
 Is never poor, but in another's wealth : 
 
 On best men's harms and griefe he feeds his fill ; 
 
 Else his own maw doth eat with spiteful will : 
 
 111 must the temper be, when diet is so ill. 
 
 In the year 1606 there was published a pamphlet 
 written by Thomas Dekker (15 75?-! 641 ?), entitled 
 "The Seven Deadly Sins of London ; drawn in seven 
 several coaches through the seven several gates of 
 the city, bringing the plague with them." Dekker 
 has written a pamphlet which is delightful reading, 
 full of vivid and graphic description, and bubbling 
 over with mirth ; but he disregards all the medieval 
 Sins with the exception of Sloth, and introduces 
 other Sins which his readers would probably regard 
 as more modern and up to date. The book is a 
 scathing impeachment of the social life of London, 
 and Dekker, as his plays demonstrate, knew his 
 London well, especially on its under side. Certain 
 passages in the book strikingly resemble Bunyan ; 
 the dramatist in many ways is quite as full of pro- 
 found religious feeling as the Elstow workman, but 
 his environment was larger, and he had a greater 
 knowledge of men and women, and of the world. 
 Dekker's "Bill of the play" is thus quaintly phrased. 
 "The names of the actors in this old interlude of
 
 92 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 iniquity are, Politike Bankruptisme, Lying, Candle 
 Light, Sloth, Apishness, Shaving, Crueltie ; seven 
 may easily play this part, but not without a Devil ! " 
 The first is an exposure of fraudulent bankrupts, 
 as they were known in the seventeenth century. 
 Candle Light simply refers to sins done after dark 
 and is a badly chosen name altogether ; Shaving has 
 a modern equivalent in sweating, and some of Dek- 
 ker's denunciations, in a slightly varied, form may 
 be heard to-day. Politike Bankruptisme enters the 
 city by Ludgate with a grand display of pageantry, 
 and is thus described: "Because ye shall believe 
 me, I will give you his length by the scale, and an- 
 atomize his body from head to foote. Heere it is : 
 Whether he be a tradesman, or a merchant, when 
 he first set himself up, and seekes to get the world 
 into his hands (yet not to go out of ye city), or first 
 talks of countries he never saw (upon Change), he will 
 be sure to keepe his days of paymente more truly than 
 lawyers keepe their termes, or than executors keepe 
 the last lawes that the dead injoyned them to, which 
 even infidels themselves will not violate; his hand goes 
 to his head, to his meanest customer (to express his 
 humilitie) ; he is up earlier than a sarjeant, and down 
 later than a constable to proclaime his thrift. By such 
 artificiall wheeles as these he windes himselfe up into 
 the height of rich men's favors till he grow rich him- 
 selfe, and when he sees that they dare build upon his 
 credit, knowing the ground to be good, he takes upon 
 him the condition of an asse to any man that will 
 loade him with golde, and useth his credit like a ship
 
 THE SINS AND THE ELIZABETHANS 93 
 
 freighted with all sorts of merchandise by venturous 
 pilots ; for after he hath gotten into his hands so much 
 of other men's goods as will fill him to the upper deck, 
 away he sayles with it, and politickly runnes himself 
 on ground, to make the world beleeve he hath suffered 
 shipwreck." 
 
 It is only the language here that belongs to the 
 seventeenth century, all else is as applicable to-day 
 as if the writer was contributing to a modern review. 
 It is impossible to say anything about lying that is 
 original, and Dekker does not. Candle Light deals 
 chiefly with the vices of respectable citizens, and his 
 descriptions thereof are characterised by the same fear- 
 less and abounding humour that is found in his plays. 
 "The damask-coated citizen, that sat in his shop both 
 forenoon and afternoon, and lookt more sowerly on his 
 poore neighbours than if he had drunk a quart of 
 vineger at a draught, sneakes out of his own doores, 
 and slips into a taverne, where, either alone or with 
 some other that battles their money together, they soe 
 ply themselves with penny pots, which (like small shot) 
 goe ofFpowring into their fat paunches, that at length 
 they have not an eye to see withal nor a good legge 
 to stand upon. In which pickle if ainye of them 
 happen to be justled downe by a post (that in spite of 
 them will take the wall, and so reeles them into the 
 kennell), who takes them up or leades them home? 
 Who has them to bed and with a pillow smothes this 
 stealing so of good liquor, but that brazen-face Candle 
 Light ? Nay more he entices their very prentices to 
 make their desperate sallies out, and quicke retyres in 
 
 o
 
 94 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 (contrarie to the oath of their indentures which they 
 are seven yeares a swearing), only for their pintes and 
 away. Tush, this is nothing ! Yong shopkeepers that 
 have newly ventured upon the pikes of marriage, who 
 are every houre showing their wares to their cus- 
 tomers, plying their businesse harder all day than 
 Vulcan does his anvile, and seeme better husbands 
 than fidlers that scrape for a poore living both daye 
 and night, yet even these, if they can but get candle 
 light to sit up all night in any house of reckning (that 
 is to saye in a taverne), they fall roundly to play the 
 London prize, and that 's at three severall weapons, 
 drinking, dauncing, and dicing." 
 
 There is hardly a finer piece of writing in all Dek- 
 ker's prose than the exquisite introduction to the Sin 
 of Sloth. It is full of the true Elizabethan fragrance 
 and fanciful old-world beauty, holding us by its charm 
 as we come to it. "Man doubtless was not created to 
 be an idle fellow, for then he should be God's vaga- 
 bond ; he was made for other purposes than to be ever 
 eating as the swine, ever sleeping as the dormise, ever 
 dumb as fishes in the sea, or ever prating to no purpose 
 as the birdes of the ayr ; he was not set in this univer- 
 salle orcharde to stand still as a tree, but to be cut downe 
 if he should stand still." 
 
 Reading Dekker's denunciations of idleness, we ob- 
 tain a fairly clear insight into seventeenth century social 
 problems. The "sturdy beggars" who were plentiful 
 in London streets, and often made them dangerous at 
 night, receive their full share of his severe condemna- 
 tions ; but they were often only the unemployed of the
 
 THE SINS AND THE ELIZABETHANS 95 
 
 time, such as are familiar to readers of both Elizabethan 
 sermons and Elizabethan plays. John Norden, in his 
 "Progress of Piety," 1596, shows how the "sturdy 
 beggars" were created, and bewails that no one will 
 take action to alter things. "If," says Norden, "the 
 city of London be viewed, the streets within it and the 
 suburbs and fields near it will yield of young and old, 
 men and women able of body to serve masters and to 
 labour for their living, a great number of vagabonds. 
 And, which is most lamentable, the young and tender 
 girls and lads of all ages lie under the stalls in the streets 
 by great companies, under hedges in the fields, and no 
 man taketh them up to bring them to some faculty 
 to get their living, as is commanded, but suffer them 
 to wallow still in idleness until they be past to be re- 
 claimed, falling into breaches of the laws, and so are 
 eaten up with untimely death ; who, if they had been 
 carefully provided for, they might have proved good 
 members of the weal public." When it is remembered 
 that, in addition to these classes, absolutely nothing was 
 done for the disbanded soldier or discharged sailor, 
 it will be realised that there was another side to the 
 "golden days of good Queen Bess," which has been 
 considerably overlooked by the historian. 
 
 Nevertheless Dekker's description of Sloth in his 
 litter is perfect of its kind. " A couple of unshodde 
 asses carry it betweene them ; it is all sluttishly over- 
 grown with mosse on the outside, and on the inside 
 quilted throughout with downe pillowes: Sleep and 
 Plenty leads the fore asse, a pursie double-chind 
 Laena, riding by on a sumpter horse with provander
 
 96 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 at his mouth, and she is the litter driver ; she keeps 
 two pages, and those are an Irish beggar on the one 
 side, and one that says he has been a soldier on the 
 other side. His attendants are Sickness, Want, Ignor- 
 ance, Infamy, Bondage, Paleness, Blockishness, and 
 Carelessness. The retayners that wear his cloth are 
 anglers, dumb ministers, players, exchange wenches, 
 gamesters, panders, whores, and fiddlers." 
 
 In apishness he seems to be attacking that com- 
 paratively harmless, if also useless, personage the fop, 
 and attacking him for Puritan reasons only. Dekker 
 can be severe enough on the Puritan when he chooses, 
 but he shows his sympathies with them in this fine 
 piece of description from the chapter on apishness. 
 " Man is God's ape, and an ape is zani to a man, doing 
 over those tricks (especially if they be knavish) which 
 he sees done before him, so that apishness is nothing 
 but counterfeiting or imitation ; and this flower, which, 
 when it first came into the Citie, had a prettie scent, 
 and a delightful colour, hath been let to runne so high 
 that it is now seeded, and where it falls there rises 
 up a stinking weede." 
 
 Henry Constable, a poet of repute of the same period 
 as Dekker (1562-161 3), and a staunch adherent of the 
 Catholic faith, who in 1595 had to flee from England 
 because of his loyalty to his Church, gives us the Sins in 
 a love sonnet. He was one of the group of Elizabethan 
 sonnetters, but most of his poetry was of an intensely 
 religious kind. In his sonnet dealing with the Sins, 
 the Seven are simply named ; but the Catholic writer 
 puts them in their ancient order, and knows nothing
 
 THE SINS AND THE ELIZABETHANS 97 
 
 of the changes or the variations given to them by the 
 Protestant poet or pamphleteer. 
 
 Mine eye with all the Deadly Sins is fraught : 
 
 First Proud, sith it presumed to look so high. 
 
 A watchman being made, stood gazing by, 
 And Idle took no heed till I was caught : 
 And Envious bears envy that by thought 
 
 Should, in his absence, be to her so nigh. 
 
 To kill my heart mine eye let in her eye, 
 And so consent gave to a murder wrought. 
 And Covetous it never would remove 
 
 From her fair hair ; gold so doth please his sight ! 
 Unchaste, a bawd between my heart and love ; 
 
 A Glutton eye, with tears drunk every night. 
 These Sins procured have a Goddess' Ire ; 
 Wherefore my heart is damned in Love's sweet fire.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Exeunt the Sins. 
 
 IT is in the period of the Civil War, and amid the 
 the savage strife of the Puritan uprising, that the 
 Sins pass out of English Literature. Their final ap- 
 pearance is in a little volume of devotion over which 
 a fierce and bitter controversy raged. It was published 
 in 1627, its author being John Cosin (1594-1671), 
 who afterwards became Bishop of Durham, and it was 
 entitled "A Collection of Private Devotions: in the 
 practice of the ancient Church called the Hours of 
 Prayer, as they were after this manner published by 
 authority of Queen Elizabeth, taken out of the Holy 
 Scriptures, the ancient fathers, and the divine services 
 of our own Church." It is a beautiful little book, 
 marked by both piety and learning, and full of the 
 fragrance of a pure and lofty faith. But Cosin was 
 known to be a friend of the King and of Laud, was a 
 devout and loyal churchman, and one of the greatest 
 scholars of the time ; and so the Puritan faction smelt 
 Popery in the innocent little volume of prayers and 
 psalms. How it was received is told by Peter Heylin 
 in his life of Laud, in the following passage : " About 
 this time (i 627) also came out a book entitled 'A Col- 
 lection of Private Devotions or the Hours of Prayer,' 
 composed by Cosens, one of the prebends of Durham,
 
 EXEUNT THE SINS 99 
 
 at the request, and for the satisfaction, as was then 
 generally believed, of the Countess of Denbigh, the 
 only sister of the Duke, and then supposed to be un- 
 settled in the religion here established, if not warping 
 from it. A book which had in it much good matter, 
 but not well pleasing in the form." 
 
 The reputation of Peter Heylin for accuracy is 
 markedly indifferent, and his statement that the book 
 was written, or rather compiled, for the benefit of 
 the Countess of Denbigh is entirely contrary to fact. 
 Cosin himself told the story of its origin to John Evelyn, 
 some twenty years later, as will be shown presently. 
 But Heylin, although he may have been ignorant of the 
 reason for its appearance, knows all about the contro- 
 versy which the book aroused. He continues, "the 
 book was approved by Mountain, then Bishop of 
 London, and by him licensed for the press, with the 
 subscription of his own hand to it. Which notwith- 
 standing, it startled many at first, who, otherwise very 
 moderate and sober men, looked upon it as a prepara- 
 tory to usher in the superstitions of the Church of 
 Rome. The title gave offence to some by reason of 
 the correspondence it held with the Popish Horaries ; 
 but the frontispiece a great deal more, on the top 
 whereof was found the name of Jesus figured in three 
 capitals (I. H. S.) with a cross upon them encircled 
 with the sun, supported by two angels, with two 
 devout women praying towards it." His description 
 of the title page is very accurate, and looking at the 
 quaint and pretty little frontispiece to-day it is hardly 
 possible to avoid a feeling of contempt for the bitter-
 
 100 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 souled sectaries who saw nothing but evil where the 
 intention was nothing but good. The book was 
 savagely attacked by both Prynne and Burton. Bur- 
 ton's book attracted but little notice ; it is a very 
 feeble performance and called for none, but it was far 
 otherwise with that of William Prynne. He was a 
 man of striking ability and dogged tenacity of pur- 
 pose, but his nature was cold, hard, and unsympathetic 
 to the last degree, and he was without mercy for those 
 who had the temerity to think differently from himself. 
 Samuel Rawson Gardiner says of him, " He had no 
 formative genius, no broad culture, no sense of the 
 relative importance of things distasteful to him." He 
 held it to be the duty of the State, or of Parliament, 
 "to establish the true religion in our church, to abolish 
 and suppress all false, all new and counterfeit doc- 
 trines whatever," and in that spirit he approached 
 the criticism of this harmless little volume. 
 
 The title of Prynne's book is "A brief Censure 
 and Survey of Cozens, his Cozening Devotions, Anno. 
 1 628." It contains twice as much matter as the book 
 he attacks, and is very wearisome reading in these days 
 when book and controversy alike are forgotten. His 
 style of criticism would have commended him to Jef- 
 fery, if it had been a little more scholarly, and he had 
 lived in the days of the Edinburgh Review. His 
 reading had been wide, if not deep, and his power of 
 making a mountain out of a molehill would have made 
 him an invaluable critic of political ideas had he lived 
 in our own time. He takes the book page by page in 
 the most systematic way and finds Popery in every
 
 EXEUNT THE SINS IOI 
 
 line. "Matins" and "Evensong" are Popish words, 
 and he was on sure ground when he came to the 
 Seven Deadly Sins. Cosin makes no comment on 
 them whatever. He simply puts them down in their 
 order as things to be avoided, as he sets down the 
 Seven Virtues as things to be commended and fol- 
 lowed, but does not utter a single word of a doctrinal 
 or other character concerning them. Nevertheless 
 Prynne brings all his heavy artillery to bear on them, 
 and from his standpoint, proves Cosin to be a rank 
 Papist. He says ; " From this we descend to the en- 
 suing point, that there are some sins which are but 
 venial, not mortal in their own nature, which is evi- 
 dently deduced from this passage : ' Seven Deadly Sins, 
 i, Pride; 2, Covetousness ; 3, Luxury; 4, Envy; 5, 
 Gluttony ; 6, Anger; 7, Sloth'; which as it is directly 
 stolen out of 'Our Lady's Primer'; 'Ledesma, his 
 Catechism,' cap. 14; 'The Houres of our Lady,' 
 printed at Paris, 1556, fol. 345 ; 'Bellarmines Chris- 
 tian Doctrine,' cap. 19; ' Otium Spirituale,' by 
 Mathias Ceschi, page 122, and other Popish pam- 
 phlets, catechisms, and devotions, and not out of any 
 Protestant authors, so it necessarily implies that these 
 Seven Sins are the greater sins of all others, and that 
 there are some sins which are not deadly in their own 
 nature ; for so do the Popish writers infer from them : 
 whence it is that after they have discoursed of these 
 Seven Deadly Sins, they then fall immediately to dis- 
 pute of venial sins, which venial sins our own and all 
 other Protestant Churches do renounce. Neither is 
 this in any way salved by the clause 'as they are com- 
 
 p
 
 102 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 monly so called,' which our author (conscious no 
 doubt to himself of his own guilt) hath added to his 
 later impressions. For these are nowhere commonly 
 called the Seven Deadly Sins but among Turks and 
 Papists, not among Protestants. Whence ' Our Lady's 
 Primer,' and 'James Ledesma the Jesuit, his Cate- 
 chism,' cap. 14, speaking of these Seven Sins, give 
 them this superscription, 'the seven capital Sins com- 
 monly called deadly,' so that our authors later edition, 
 which renders it not 'Deadly Sins' as his first im- 
 pression doth, but 'Seven Deadly Sins, as they are 
 commonly so called,' doth rather more than mend 
 his cause, because it is now more suitable to 'Ledes- 
 ma' and 'Our Lady's Primer,' than before, and so 
 more likely to infer this Popish conclusion, that there 
 are some Sins that are but venial in their nature, 
 which Protestants do quite renounce." 
 
 The passage relating to "Turks and Papists " raises a 
 most interesting point for discussion. On the face of it 
 the reference appears to be a mere gibe at Catholicism, 
 animated by a desire to link it with everything which, 
 in the opinion of William Prynne, appeared to be bad. 
 But on the other hand there is, according to Sale, a 
 tradition that Mohammed taught there were seven 
 "grievous Sins" which were, idolatry, murder, false 
 accusations of adultery brought against honest women, 
 wasting the substance of orphans, taking of usury, 
 desertion in a religious expedition, and disobedience 
 to parents. There are references to "grievous Sins" 
 in the Koran, but they are nowhere classed as seven 
 in number. Prynne knew a good many things : did
 
 EXEUNT THE SINS 
 
 103 
 
 he know of this tradition ? It is most unlikely, for 
 very few people in England in the middle of the 
 seventeenth century knew anything about the reli- 
 gion of Mohammed ; but it is not impossible. 
 
 The attack on the little book did it no special harm 
 among those whose intellectual outlook was wider 
 than that of Prynne ; indeed, according to Heylin, it 
 seems to have done it good, for he says; "But for all 
 this violent opposition, and the great clamour made 
 against it, the book grew up into esteem, and justified 
 itself without any advocate, insomuch that many of 
 those who first startled at it in regard of its title, found 
 in the body of it so much piety, such regular forms of 
 divine worship, such necessary consolations in special 
 exigencies that they reserved it by them as a jewel of 
 great price and value." 
 
 The book passed through many editions, but in 
 those published after the author's death, the offending 
 title page was replaced by one which seems to have 
 satisfied both the orthodoxy and the prejudice of the 
 time. The name of Jesus, the cross and the praying 
 women were superseded by the Royal coat of arms ; 
 and although the text was not tampered with, the 
 book had now an air of commonplace respectability 
 which no doubt helped it presently to pass out of notice 
 altogether. As a matter of fact Cosin himself was a 
 very staunch and loyal Protestant, of the two a better 
 one than William Prynne, as the latter in his closing 
 years was deep in the confidences of his most Catholic 
 Majesty Charles II, while Cosin, who became the 
 greatest ecclesiastic of his time, sturdily defended the
 
 104 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 Protestantism of the English Church. On the first of 
 October, 1661, after morning service at the Chapel 
 Royal, Cosin was dining with Evelyn, to whom he con- 
 fided the real story of the origin of the book. In 1 627, 
 when the " Devotions " were first issued, Queen Henri- 
 etta Maria had resolved to have none but Roman 
 Catholic waiting women about her person, being ap- 
 prehensive of Puritan spies. This meant the dismissal 
 from Court of ladies of noble birth, and Cosin had 
 apparently felt it his duty to condole with them. 
 
 The incident as related by Evelyn (Oct. i , 1 65 1), is 
 as follows: "The Dean of Peterborough, Dr. Cosin, 
 preached on Job xiii. i 5, encouraging our trust in God 
 on all events and extremities, and for establishing and 
 comforting some ladies of great quality, who were then 
 to be discharged from our Queen Mother's service, un- 
 less they would go over to the Romish Mass. 
 
 "The Dean dining this day at our house, fold me 
 the occasion of publishing those offices, which among 
 the Puritans were wont to be called 'Cosin's cozening 
 devotions' by way of derision. At the first coming of 
 the Queen into England, she and her French ladies 
 were often upbraiding our religion, that had neither 
 appointed nor set forth any hours of prayer or brevi- 
 aries by which the ladies and courtiers, who have much 
 spare time, might edify and be in devotion, as they 
 had. Our Protestant ladies, scandalised it seems at 
 this, moved in the matter to the King, whereupon his 
 Majesty presently called Bishop White to him, and 
 asked his thoughts of it, and whether there might not 
 be found some forms of prayer proper on such occa-
 
 EXEUNT THE SINS 105 
 
 sions, collected out of some already approved forms, 
 so that the Court ladies and others (who spend much 
 time in trifling) might at least appear as devout and 
 be so as the new-come-over French ladies, who took 
 occasion to reproach our want of zeal and religion. 
 On which the Bishop told his Majesty it might be 
 done easily and was very necessary : whereupon the 
 King commanded him to employ some person of the 
 clergy to compile such a work, and presently the 
 Bishop naming Dr. Cosin, the King enjoyned him to 
 charge the Doctor in his name to set about it imme- 
 diately. This the Dean told me he did, and three 
 months after bringing the book to the King, he com- 
 manded the Bishop of London to read it over and 
 make his report ; this was so well liked that (contrary 
 to former custom of doing it by a chaplain) he would 
 needs give it an imprimatur under his own hand. 
 Upon this there were at first only two hundred copies 
 printed; 'nor,' said he, 'was there anything in the 
 whole book of my own composure, nor did I set any 
 name as author to it, but those necessary prefaces, &c., 
 out of the Fathers, touching the times and seasons 
 of prayer ; all the rest being entirely translated and 
 collected out of an office published by the authority of 
 Queen Elizabeth in 1560, and our own Liturgy.' 
 This I rather mentioned to justify that learned and 
 pious Dean, who had exceedingly suffered by it as if 
 he had done it of his own head to introduce Popery, 
 from which no man was more averse, and one who in 
 this time of temptation held and confirmed many to 
 our Church."
 
 106 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS 
 
 In this controversy, a quarrel of mighty import from 
 the seventeenth century point of view, but a mere 
 tempest in a teacup from ours, the Seven Deadly Sins 
 take their final leave of English literature. For more 
 than six centuries we find them a living and vitalising 
 force in the intellect of our nation, stirring the ima- 
 gination and arousing the conscience of poet, preacher 
 and playwright alike. The essential verity of their 
 idea neither the subtleties of the theologians nor the 
 criticisms of the philosophers could obscure or gainsay. 
 If they have gone from literature, they have not gone 
 from life : still they lurk like foul vampires in its caverns 
 and its darkened forests, still in their moments of daring 
 and of strength we may behold them dancing their old 
 and hideous dance. 
 
 Printed at The Shakespeare Head Press, Stratford-on-A-von.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abraham : 14 
 Abstinence : 24 
 Actaeon : 36 
 Adam : 15, 16, 17 
 Aelfric's Homilies : 43 
 Angels' Annunciation : 14 
 Anger : 2, 101 
 Apocalypse : 40, 65 
 Apostle Paul : 4, 1 7 
 Aquinas, St. Thomas : 4, 73 
 Arnold, Dr. Thomas: 44 
 Arnway, Sir John : 13 
 Augustine, St. : 2, 6, 9, 12, 49 
 Avarice: 15, 16, 24, 31, 58, 
 
 81, 82 
 
 Ayenbite of Inwyt : 40 
 Bad Angel : 23, 27 
 Backbiter : 23 
 Balaam : 1 4 
 Balak : 1 4 
 
 Bampton Lectures : I o 
 Ben Jonson : 72, 82 
 Burns, Robert : 67 
 Bunyan, John : 32, 65 
 Byron, Lord : 24 
 Castle of Perseverance : 18, 19, 
 
 28 
 Catholic Church : 2, 3, 42, 45, 
 
 ^ 6 3> 6 4 
 
 Catherine, St. : 10 
 
 Charles II. : 103 
 
 Chaucer: 37, 39, 41, 44, 49 
 
 Chester Plays: 12, 13 
 
 Christ : 14, 15, 16 
 
 "City of God": 6 
 
 Clement, Bishop of Rome : 13 
 
 "Confessio Amantis": 36 
 
 Constable, Henry : 96, 97 
 
 " Conversion of St. Paul " : 1 7 
 
 Cosin, John: 98, 99, 101, 104 
 
 Cruden, Alexander : I 
 
 "Cursor Mundi": 43 
 Dan Michel, of Northgate : 40 
 Dante : 43 
 Dark Ages: 55 
 Death : 25 
 Decay : 65 
 
 Denbigh, Countess of: 99 
 Dean of Peterborough : 104 
 Dekker, 93, 94, 95, 96 
 Digby Mysteries : 1 7 
 Discomfort, Dissimulation, Dis- 
 traction : 65 
 Doubleness : 65 
 Duessa: 79, 84 
 Dunbar, William : 67, 68, 69, 
 
 72, 77> 83 
 
 Eastern Counties : 33 
 Edmunds, John : 63 
 Egypt: 10 
 Egyptian : i o 
 Elizabeth, Queen: 74, 75, 76, 
 
 98 
 Envy: 15, 18, 41, 43, 51, 58, 
 
 70, 77 
 
 "Expositor": 15, 1 6 
 Faustus: 76, 77 
 Francis, Sir Henry: 12, 13 
 "Five Wyttes": 19 
 Foxe, John : 62 
 Furnival, Dr. F. J. : 17, 18 
 "Give me lysens to live at ease " : 
 
 60 
 
 Gloominess: 9 
 
 God: 26, 27, 47, 49, 73, 76 
 Good Angel: 21, 25 
 Gluttony: 2, 15, 18, 43, 51, 
 
 101 
 Gower, John : 29, 32, 33, 34, 
 
 35, 3 6 
 Guild of the Butchers: 14 
 
 Hallam, Henry : 63
 
 INDEX 
 
 "Handlyng Sinne": 43 
 Hawes, Stephen : 65 
 Heaven : 14, 21, 69 
 Heggenet, Don Randle : 12 
 Hell: 14,21,26,27,63,69,77 
 Heylin, Peter : 98, 99 
 Horaries, Popish : 99 
 Humanum Genus: 19 
 "Instructions for Parish 
 
 Priests : 54 
 Jesus : 99 
 John, St. : 40 
 Judgement : 1 2 
 Justice : 40 
 Kalendar of Shepherds : 45, 47, 
 
 49, 52, 63 
 Koran : 102 
 Latimer, Hugh : 66 
 Langland, William : 29, 30, 81 
 Ledesma, James: 101, 102 
 Lechery: 15, 18, 58, 71, 78 
 Lourens, Friar : 39, 40, 48, 50 
 Lust: 2, 13 
 Lydgate, John : 76 
 Luxuria: 31, 39 
 Mahoun : 68, 72 
 Marlowe, Chris. : 68, 76, 78, 79 
 Mankind : 19, 21, 23, 25, 27 
 Mary Stuart: 78, 84 
 Mathias Ceschi : 101 
 " Mirror of the Periods of Man's 
 
 Life": 58 
 
 "Mirror of St. Edmund": 43 
 Mohammed : 102, 103 
 Morley, Prof. Henry : 34 
 Myrc, John: 54, 55 
 Newall, William : 12 
 Nicholas the Fifth : 12 
 Norden, John : 95 
 "Our Lady's Primer": 102 
 Parson, The : 37, 40 
 
 " Pastime of Pleasure " : 65 
 
 Patience : 9 
 
 Peele, George : 74 
 
 Petavius : 93 
 
 Piers the Plowman : 29 
 
 Plumptre, 43 
 
 Pollard, A. W.: 19 
 
 Pride: 2, 30, 41, 42, 51, 57, 
 
 69, 101 
 Prynne, William: 100, 101, 
 
 103 
 
 Pynson, Richard : 45 
 Puritan : 98, 100 
 Queen Henrietta Maria: 104 
 Reason : 5 9 
 
 Reformation, The : 62, 72 
 Richard II. : 35, 36 
 Scannell's Catholic Dictionary : 
 
 m 3 
 Sins, Paintings of, in Churches : 
 
 53,54 
 Sloth: 2, 32, 42, 57, 71, 77, 80, 
 
 97, 101 
 
 Sommer, H. Oskar : 52, 53 
 " Speculum Meditantis " : 33, 34 
 Straw, Jack : 33 
 Sidgwick, Henry : 9 
 Ten Commandments : 66 
 Temperance : 9, 1 2 
 Tarlton, Richard: 75 
 "Turks and Papists": 102 
 Tyler, Wat : 33 
 Vain Glory : 9 
 Virtues: 9, 23, 24, 28, 49, 60, 
 
 101 
 
 "Vox Clamantis": 33 
 Virgil : 43 
 Wanhope : 68 
 Whitsun Plays : 1 2 
 Wycliffe, John : 44 
 Zodiac : 47
 
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