pages of Chaucer than in the remains of the Cambrian bard. Her doctrines, it is true, retained but a faint and wavering hold on his understanding, but her gorgeous and varied ceremonies supplied a fund of imagery that was highly acceptable to his imagination. Illustrations and similes drawn from the accompaniments of the worship of the Roman Catholic church are profusely scattered through his writings, and allusions to her rites pervade his poetry. But these ornaments are sometimes introduced with a tone of levity that sufficiently evinces how powerfully the fancy may be affected by showy pageants which leave the conscience and the heart untouched.
The fondness displayed by Davyth ap Gwilym for the embellishments of the church forms a singular contrast with the acrimony with which he so often assails her priesthood. In the one instance we see the taste of the poet, in the other we recognise the feelings of the man. It is highly interesting to observe that the bard’s fiercest invectives are directed against the eleemosynary clergy—the Franciscan and Dominican friars—who are also the object of Chaucer’s bitterest satire; and in a poem previously quoted it is observable that he appears to insinuate against these orders the same charges that are advanced by his contemporary—an abject devotion to the Romish See—and hypocritical professions of religion combined with the servile arts and low frauds of the common mendicant[1]:—
- ↑ See the poem, p. 432. The object of his attack in that production must have been a Dominican friar, for he calls
