towns. Among the latter features are the specially evangelical source of
the "Parson's" learning and teaching; and his outward appearance--the
wandering, staff in hand, which was specially noted in an archiepiscopal
diatribe against these novel ministers of the people. Yet it seems
unnecessary to conclude anything beyond this: that the feature which
Chaucer desired above all to mark and insist upon in his "Parson," was the
Poverty and humility which in him contrasted with the luxurious self-
indulgence of the "Monk," and the blatant insolence of the "Pardoner."
From this point of view it is obvious why the "Parson" is made brother to
the "Ploughman." For, in drawing the latter, Chaucer cannot have
forgotten that other Ploughman whom Langland's poem had identified with
Him for whose sake Chaucer's poor workman laboured for his poor
neighbours, with the readiness always shown by the best of his class. Nor
need this recognition of the dignity of the lowly surprise us in Chaucer,
who had both sense of justice and sense of humour enough not to flatter
one class at the expense of the rest, and who elsewhere (in the "Manciples
Tale") very forcibly puts the truth that what in a great man is called a
coup d'etat is called by a much simpler name in a humbler fellow-sinner.

But though, in the "Parson of a Town," Chaucer may not have wished to
paint a Wycliffite priest--still less a Lollard, under which designation
so many varieties of malcontents, in addition to the followers of Wyclif,
were popularly included--yet his eyes and ears were open; and he knew well
enough what the world and its children are at all times apt to call those
who are not ashamed of their religion, as well as those who make too
conscious a profession of it. The world called them Lollards at the close
of the fourteenth century, and it called them Puritans at the close of the
sixteenth, and Methodists at the close of the eighteenth. Doubtless the
vintners and the shipmen of Chaucer's day, the patrons and purveyors of
the playhouse in Ben Jonson's, the fox-hunting squires and town wits of