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If, then, this crypt may be assumed to be a confessio, there follows a very interesting consequence.
"What was it?" asked Lestrange carelessly. "It was a wonderful copy unique as to condition of Gower's Confessio Amantis; not a very interesting book, though I do not doubt Shakespeare was fond of it. You see Shakespeare could hear the stones preaching!" "By Jove, a man may hear the sticks do that any Sunday!" "True enough, sir, ha-ha!" "Have you read Gower, then?" "A good deal of him."
Patrick, notwithstanding his intimate knowledge of the leanings of the race, expresses in his "Confessio" the wonder and delight he experienced when he saw in what manner and in what numbers they begged to be consecrated to God the very first day after their baptism.
He is famous for Mandeville's Travels, a book which romances about the wonders to be seen abroad. The fifth writer of the age is Gower, who wrote in three languages, French, Latin, and English. His chief English work is the Confessio Amantis, a long poem containing one hundred and twelve tales. Of these only the "Knight Florent" and two or three others are interesting to a modern reader.
Mechanically he took his Confessio Amantis, and sat down, but never opened it; rose again and took his Shakespere, opened it, but could not read; rose once more, took his Vulgate, and read: 'Quid turbamini, et ploratis? puella non est mortua, sed dormit. He laid that book also down, fell on his knees, and prayed for her who was not dead but sleeping.
Compare some verses of his translation of the Bible with the 1611 version. Piers Plowman and Gower. G.C. Macaulay has a good volume of selections from Gower's Confessio Amantis. What is the difference between the form of the verse in Piers Plowman and Handling Synne? Who is Piers? Who are some of the other characters in the poem? What type of life is specially described?
The "Confessio Amantis" is no book for all times like the "Canterbury Tales"; but the conjoined names of Chaucer and Gower added strength to one another in the eyes of the generations ensuing, little anxious as these generations were to distinguish which of the pair was really the first to it "garnish our English rude" with the flowers of a new poetic diction and art of verse.
He could not, like Chaucer, transfuse old things into new, but there is enough in his character as a poet to explain the friendship between the pair, of which we hear at the very time when Gower was probably preparing his "Confessio Amantis" for publication.
It is thought that the Romanizing party which prevailed at the Synod of Whitby affected for its churches the Italian type, one of the characteristics of which was the Confessio, an underground chamber for relics situated under the high altar, and surrounded, except toward the church, by a passage reached by steps from the body of the building, whence, moreover, there were generally steps leading up to the floor of the presbytery, and sometimes an incline stretching down to a window that looked into the chamber below.
In truth, however, Occleve, the only name-worthy poetical writer of the reign of Henry IV, seems to have been less akin as an author to Chaucer than to Gower, while his principal poem manifestly was, in an even greater degree than the "Confessio Amantis," a severely learned or, as its author terms it, unbuxom book.
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