But were there any person obstinate, What so he were, of high or low estate, Him would he sharply snub at once. Than this A better priest, I trow, there nowhere is.
He waited for no pomp and reverence, Nor made himself a spiced conscience;But Christes lore and His Apostles' twelve He taught, but first he followed it himself.
The most striking features in this portrait are undoubtedly those which are characteristics of the good and humble working clergyman of all times;and some of these, accordingly, Goldsmith could appropriately borrow for his gentle poetic sketch of his parson-brother in "Sweet Auburn." But there are likewise points in the sketch which may be fairly described as specially distinctive of Wyclif's Simple Priests--though, as should be pointed out, these Priests could not themselves be designated parsons of 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 Cowper's, like their successors after them, were not specially anxious to distinguish nicely between more or less abominable varieties of saintliness. Hence, when Master Harry Bailly's tremendous oaths produce the gentlest of protests from the "Parson," the jovial "Host"incontinently "smells a Lollard in the wind," and predicts (with a further flow of expletives) that there is a sermon to follow. Whereupon the "Shipman" protests not less characteristically:--"Nay, by my father's soul, that shall he not,"Saide the Shipman, "here shall he not preach, He shall no gospel here explain or teach.
We all believe in the great God," quoth he;
