world in the person of Jesus Christ; in the author’s own phrase—‘Petrus est Christus.’ If this be borne in mind, it will not be possible to make the mistake into which so many have fallen, of speaking of Piers the Plowman as being the author, not the subject, of the poem. The author once alludes to the nickname of Long Will bestowed upon him from his tallness of stature—just as the poet Gascoigne was familiarly called Long George. Though there is mention of the Malvern hills more than once near the beginning of the poem, it is abundantly clear that the poet lived for ‘many years in Cornhill (London), with his wife Kitte and his daughter Calote.’ He seems to have come to London soon after the date of the first commencement of his work, and to have long continued there. He describes himself as being a tall man, one who was loath to reverence lords or ladies or persons in gay apparel, and not deigning to say ‘God save you’ to the sergeants whom he met in the street, insomuch that many people took him to be a fool. He was very poor, wore long robes, and had a shaven crown, having received the clerical tonsure. But he seems only to have taken minor orders, and earned a precarious living by singing the placebo, dirige and seven psalms for the good of men’s souls. The fact that he was married may explain why he never rose in the church. But he had another source of livelihood in his ability to write out legal documents, and he was extremely familiar with the law courts at Westminster. His leisure time must have been entirely occupied with his poem, which was essentially the work of his lifetime. He was not satisfied with rewriting it once, but he actually re-wrote it twice; and from the abundance of the MSS. which still exist we can see its development from the earliest draught (A-text), written about 1362, to its latest form (C-text), written about 1393.[1]
“In 1399, just before the deposition of Richard II., appeared a poem addressed to the king, who is designated as ‘Richard the Redeless,’ i.e. devoid of counsel. This poem, occurring in only one MS. [of the B-text] in which it is incomplete, breaking off abruptly in the middle of a page, may safely be attributed to Langland, who was then in Bristol. As he was at that time about sixty-seven years of age, we may be sure that he did not long survive the accession of Henry IV. It may here be observed that the well-known poem, entitled Pierce Ploughman’s Crede, though excellently written, is certainly an imitation by another hand; for the Pierce Ploughman of the Crede is very different in conception from the subject of ‘William’s Vision.’ ”
On the other hand, the view taken by Professor J. M. Manly, of Chicago, which has recently obtained increasing acceptance among scholars, is that the early popularity of the Piers Plowman poems has resulted in “the confusion of what is really the work of five different men,” and that Langland himself is “a mythical author.” The argument for the distinction in authorship rests on internal evidence, and on analysis of the style, diction and “visualizing” quality within the different texts. Whereas Skeat, regarding the three texts as due to the same author, gives most attention to the later versions, and considers B the intermediate form, as on the whole the best, Manly recognizes in A the real poet, and lays special stress on the importance of attention to the A-text, and particularly pass. i.-viii. In this A-text the two first visions are regarded as by a single author of genius, but the third is assigned to a continuator who tried to imitate him, the whole conclusion of the 12th passus being, moreover, by a third author, whose name, John But, is in fact given towards the end, but in a way leading Skeat only to credit him with a few lines. The same process of analysis leads to crediting the B-text and the C-text to separate and different authors, B working over the three visions of the A-text and making additions of his own, while C again worked over the B-text. The supposed references to the original author A, introduced by B and C, are then to be taken as part of the fiction. Who were the five authors? That question is left unsolved. John But, according to Professor Manly, was “doubtless a scribe” or “a minstrel.” B, C and the continuator of A “seem to have been clerics, and, from their criticisms of monks and friars, to have been of the secular clergy,” C being “a better scholar than either the continuator of A or B.” A, who “exempts from his satire no order of society except monks,” may have been himself a monk, but “as he exhibits no special technical knowledge or interests” he “may have been a layman.” As regards Richard the Redeless, Professor Manly attributes this to another imitator; he regards identity of authorship as out of the question, in consequences of differences in style and thought, apart altogether from the conclusion as to the authorship of Piers the Plowman.
See the editions already referred to: The Deposition of Richard II., ed. T. Wright (Camden Society), which is the same poem as Richard the Redeless; Warton, Hist. of Eng. Poetry; Rev. H. H. Milman, Hist. of Latin Christianity; G. P. Marsh, Lectures on English; H. Morley, English Writers; B. ten Brink, Early English Literature; J. J. Jusserand, Observations sur la vision de P. P. (Paris, 1879); Les Anglais au moyen âge: L’Épopée mystique de William Langland (1893, Eng. trans. Piers Plowman, revised and enlarged by another 1894); J. M. Manly in Cambridge Hist. of English Lit., vol. ii. and bibliography. A long and careful summary of the whole poem is given in Morley’s English Writers, and is repeated in his Illustrations of English Religion, ch. iii.
LANGLEY, SAMUEL PIERPONT (1834–1906), American
physicist and astronomer, was born at Roxbury, Boston,
Massachusetts, on the 22nd of August 1834. After acting
for a short time as assistant in Harvard College Observatory,
he was appointed assistant professor of mathematics in the U.S.
Naval Academy in 1866, and in the following year became director
of the Allegheny Observatory at Pittsburg, a position which he
held until his selection in 1887 as secretary of the Smithsonian
Institution at Washington. His name is especially associated
with two main branches of investigation—aeronautics, and the
exploration of the infra-red portions of the solar spectrum.
The study of the latter he took up as a result of the publication
in 1871 of an energy-curve of the spectrum by S. I. Lamansky.
The imperfections of the thermopile, with which he began his
work, led him, about 1880, to the invention of the bolometer,
an instrument of extraordinary delicacy, which in its most
refined form is believed to be capable of detecting a change of
temperature amounting to less than one-hundred-millionth of
a degree Centigrade. Depending on the fact that the electrical
conductivity of a metallic conductor is decreased by heat, it
consists of two strips of platinum, arranged to form the two arms
of a Wheatstone bridge; one strip being exposed to a source
of radiation from which the other is shielded, the heat causes
a change in the resistance of one arm, the balance of the bridge
is destroyed, and a deflection is marked on the galvanometer.
The platinum strips are exceedingly minute, being in some
cases only 1250 in. in width, and less than one-tenth of that
amount in thickness. By the aid of this instrument, Langley,
working on Mount Whitney, 12,000 ft. above sea-level, discovered
in 1881 an entirely unsuspected extension of the invisible
infra-red rays, which he called the “new spectrum.” The
importance of his achievement may be judged from the fact
that, while the visible spectrum includes rays having wave-lengths
of from about 0.4 μ to 0.76 μ, and no invisible heat-rays were
known before 1881 having a wave-length greater than 1.8 μ,
he detected rays having a wave-length of 5.3 μ. In addition,
taking advantage of the accuracy with which the bolometer
can determine the position of a source of heat by which it is
affected, he mapped out in this infra-red spectrum over 700
dark lines or bands resembling the Fraunhofer lines of the visible
spectrum, with a probable accuracy equal to that of refined
astronomical observations. In aeronautics he succeeded in
demonstrating the practicability of mechanical flight. He first
undertook a preliminary inquiry into the principles upon which
flight depends, and established at Allegheny a huge “whirling
table,” the revolving arm of which could be driven by a steam-engine
at any circumferential speed up to 70 m. an hour. The
construction of a flying machine was next attempted. The
first difficulty was to make it sufficiently light in relation to
the power its machinery could develop; and several machines
were built in which trials were made of steam, and of compressed
air and carbonic acid gas as motive agents. About 1893 a
- ↑ According to Jusserand, 1398.
