Thomas Campbell and the Unmaking of John Gower

ORCID iD: 0000-0001-6605-7577
ISSN: Print 2754-4575
ISSN: Online 2754-4583
DOI: 10.57686/256204/36

© 2024 Eric Weiskott
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY)

Introduction

Until relatively recently, John Gower had a claim to be one of the authors most dramatically fallen from favour in all of English literature. His early reception was instant and warm. In the poetic firmament constructed by John Walton, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, Osbern Bokenham, George Ashby, James I of Scotland, William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, Stephen Hawes, John Skelton, Philip Sidney, Robert Greene, William Shakespeare, and other fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English and Scottish poets, as well as historians like John Bale, John Leland, and John Foxe and the printer William Caxton, Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer both shone brightly.¹ They could be mentioned in the same breath, with a straight face. Shakespeare, for example, has his Gower play, Pericles, and his Chaucer play, Troilus and Cressida. By 1900, a review of the first ever edition of Gower’s complete works, edited by G. C. Macaulay, began by deprecating the whole enterprise of editing Gower: ‘This is the first instalment of one of those monuments of tedious and unremunerative toil which, even in these days of commercialised literature, there are still scholars to put together’.² What happened in between? When did Gower’s star fall?

Siân Echard, Robert R. Edwards, Derek Pearsall, and others have canvassed the reception of Gower’s poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at a time when the Chaucer canonization industry was churning away.³ Perhaps this was the decisive moment for Gower’s critical fortunes. During the same period, William Langland’s Piers Plowman fell out of print alongside Gower’s Confessio Amantis, neither title to be published again until the 1810s.⁴ Confessio Amantis had last been printed in 1554 and Piers Plowman in 1561.⁵ Yet the ‘canon’, such as it was, remained nascent at that phase of the formation of the field of English literary history.⁶ Virtually every medieval English author apart from Chaucer was neglected during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Gower was not special. ‘The early poets were no longer needed to provide a respectable ancestry for English poetry, and their language was obsolete’, explains Pearsall, ‘and so they were discarded, only Chaucer escaping the general wrack’.⁷ I wish to focus on a later moment of choice, when it would have been thinkable for Gower to have rejoined a refurbished English literary canon, but he did not. The early nineteenth century has been less thoroughly examined by existing scholarship on Gower’s reception.

Among the works that ensured that Gower’s stock would not rise any time soon, Thomas Campbell’s Specimens of the British Poets (1819) merits consideration as a prime offender.⁸ Campbell, a noted poet himself, worked away at the project for some fifteen years. Esteemed in its time, Specimens of the British Poets is all but forgotten today.⁹ Six volumes of headnotes and selections are preceded by one volume presenting a lengthy historical essay on English poetry from the twelfth to eighteenth centuries. Although not the first published narrative history of English poetry, an honour that falls to Thomas Warton’s massive History of English Poetry (1774–1781), Campbell’s Specimens marks an advance on Warton and on intermediate efforts like George Ellis’s Specimens of the Early English Poets (1801) in the diligence with which Campbell sought out ‘specimens’ — he was unusually open to promoting less-remarked authors — and the lapidary prose in which he narrated the evolution of English and Scottish verse.¹⁰ For these reasons, as also for its late date that allowed the project to profit from intervening progress in antiquarian research, Campbell’s anthology rivalled Warton’s literary history in taste-making impact. Specimens of the British Poets had a remarkable run in print on both sides of the Atlantic. The whole of the anthology was reissued nine times in the nineteenth century, while the essay occupying volume 1 was published separately as An Essay on English Poetry in the United States and later republished twice in that form by the British publisher.¹¹ One could not contend that Campbell’s work reached more readers than Warton’s, which was itself reprinted early and often. But where Warton’s History is through-argued, mixing exposition with excerpts throughout, Campbell’s historical argument is concentrated in volume 1, the essay. Warton’s narrative has room for many turns and digressions, whereas Campbell’s is much more compressed, leading to a more dramatic presentation of the same material.

There were two contradictory impulses in commentary on Gower at the turn of the nineteenth century, praise and blame. It will become clear presently on which side of the fence Campbell fell. But before turning to his opprobrious words for Gower, one should consider the available alternative in scholarship of the period.

Gower on the upswing? Warton, Henry J. Todd, and others

It was certainly possible to be sanguine about Gower’s literary merits in the eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries, even though Confessio Amantis had been out of print for so long, to say nothing of Gower’s French and Latin works, few of which had ever been printed.¹² For Elizabeth Cooper, writing in 1737, although Gower ‘does not appear to have much Genius’, one tale in Confessio Amantis ‘has [. . .] something truly excellent both in the Incidents and Moral’.¹³ Gower’s biography in Biographia britannica (1747–1766) presents him in altogether exalted terms: ‘an eminent English poet’, he ‘had a great genius for poetry, in which he sought to accommodate the severest sentiments to the sweetest language’.¹⁴ Further:

His great merit was introducing the Muses into this kingdom, for in order of time he was before Chaucer, though he also survived him. It was from their joint endeavours, that there came to be such a thing as English poetry, for notwithstanding the distance of time, and the uncouthness of their language, the wit and genius of either sufficiently vindicates his title as a poet.¹⁵

According to Thomas Tanner’s Bibliotheca britannico-hibernica (1748), whose entry for Gower transmits the words of Leland, Gower imitated Ovid ‘studiosius quam felicius’ (more assiduously than happily), yet Gower is nonetheless ‘omnium [. . .] primum patriae linguae expolitorem’ (the very first polisher of the national language) ‘in semibarbaro saeculo’ (in a semi-barbaric age).¹⁶ ‘[N]am ante ejus aetatem Anglica lingua inculta, et fere tota rudis jacebat. Nec erat qui opus aliquod, vernaculo idiomate, eleganti lectore dignum scriberet’ (For before his time the English language lay uncultivated and almost wholly unpolished. Nor was there anyone who wrote any work, in the vernacular language, worthy of a tasteful reader).¹⁷ Tanner’s posthumous work gives Leland’s praise new currency. Half a century later, Ellis judged of Gower that ‘The popularity of this writer is, perhaps, not very likely to revive’, yet he goes on to list choice passages in Confessio Amantis ‘which might very probably be reprinted with advantage’.¹⁸ To that end, he offers the Tale of Florent from Gower’s Confessio Amantis in full, in order to enable comparison to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale.¹⁹ Gower is for Ellis ‘one of the fathers of English poetry’.²⁰

In these early citations, one senses the conflicting demands of historicism and aesthetic appreciation. Gower may be rough stuff, but if he is, it is only because English poetry was in its infancy during his lifetime. All subsequent poets owe him a debt of gratitude. Moreover, some parts of his long English work, Cooper and Ellis venture to suggest, are intrinsically worthy of the name of poetry, irrespective of Gower’s unlucky historical situation. The author of the Biographia britannica entry shows familiarity with Gower’s French and Latin poetry as well, which helps account for the effusive language of the entry.²¹ I shall return to Gower’s trilingualism by way of conclusion.

In Warton, Gower found a champion. Warton’s Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser (1754) sees Gower join Chaucer as those who ‘sought to reform the roughness of their native tongue, by naturalizing many new words from the Latin, French, and Italian’.²² They are ‘reputed the first English poets, because they first introduc’d invention into our poetry’.²³ In his History of English Poetry, Warton ratcheted up his praise for Gower and removed him from Chaucer’s shadow. ‘If Chaucer had not existed’, begins the relevant section of Warton’s History, ‘the compositions of John Gower [. . .] would alone have been sufficient to rescue the reigns of Edward the third and Richard the second from the imputation of barbarism’.²⁴ With ‘barbarism’, Warton perhaps echoes Leland’s semibarbaro. Few antiquarians in the long dry period between Confessio Amantis editions, 1554–1810, would go so far as Warton does here. He reserves particular praise for Gower’s fund of knowledge, devoting considerable ingenuity toward identifying his many sources. ‘Considered in a general view, the Confessio Amantis may be pronounced to be no unpleasing miscellany of those shorter tales which delighted the readers of the middle age’.²⁵ If Gower does not earn the very top mark for poetic inspiration, that is only by his own choice and for historically contingent reasons:

it should be considered, that when books began to grow fashionable, and the reputation of learning conferred the highest honour, poets became ambitious of being thought scholars; and sacrificed their native powers of invention to the ostentation of displaying an extensive course of reading, and to the pride of profound erudition.²⁶

Unlike most of his predecessors, Warton had the benefit of perusing Gower’s French lyrics. The ballades of Cinkante balades, which Warton was the first to identify and excerpt, ‘have much real and intrinsic merit. They are tender, pathetic, and poetical; and place our old poet Gower in a more advantageous point of view than that in which he has hitherto been usually seen’.²⁷ Elsewhere, Warton defends Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve against the charge that they ‘corrupted the purity of the English language, by affecting to introduce so many foreign words and phrases’.²⁸ So far from corrupting it, Chaucer and Gower effected a ‘considerable revolution in our language’, writes Warton.²⁹ Similarly, Ellis would name Chaucer and Gower (and Lydgate, for good measure) as those who ‘successively improved’ the English language.³⁰ Compare Leland’s patriae linguae expolitor. Claims for Gower’s chronological priority and contributions to literary English struck Warton and some of his contemporaries as powerful inducements to take Gower’s poetry seriously.

Henry J. Todd’s Illustrations of the Lives and Writings of Gower and Chaucer (1810) is a book of another stripe.³¹ The first Gower monograph, Todd’s Illustrations is the first premonition of a Gower comeback. Chaucer and Gower are ‘the reformers of our language, and the fathers of our poetry’.³² They are ‘those writers, by whom our language has been improved, and to whom our reformed religion is indebted’.³³ One bit of Confessio Amantis ‘nearly equals the tender gallantry of Petrarch’, Todd declares, and is not ‘far distant indeed’ from the ‘grace’ of John Milton’s Comus.³⁴ Still, Todd is bashful throughout about placing Gower on the same footing as Chaucer. Regarding a hypothetical new edition of Gower, such as actually appeared in Alexander Chalmers’s Works of the English Poets in the same year as Illustrations of the Lives and Writings, Todd expects that ‘it is not [. . .] probable that the work [. . .] would be very popular’.³⁵ Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers named Gower first in their encomia only because he was older than Chaucer, ‘not intending (for I cannot think so badly of their taste as to suppose that they preferred Gower to Chaucer,) any precedence in respect to talents, but merely the accustomed tribute due to seniority’.³⁶ In the end, however, the thickness of Todd’s 394-page book speaks for itself, against his more stringent comparative judgements on the author of Confessio Amantis. Todd clears up some significant matters of fact, notably the year of Gower’s death, which was 1408 as shown by Gower’s will, not 1402 as was routinely reported by Todd’s predecessors.³⁷ Unmistakably, modern Gower studies has commenced.

Gower on the downswing: Campbell’s Specimens of the British Poets and predecessors

Just nine years later, in Campbell’s Specimens of the British Poets, the tone has changed. Campbell, a Scottish poet, lecturer, and magazine editor, cobbled together a living from his literary pursuits. He was principally known in his own lifetime for the long political poem The Pleasures of Hope (1799). Specimens of the British Poets, begun in 1805, matured amid a successful series of public lectures on poetry.³⁸ Considering it takes in seven centuries, Campbell’s essay, at 269 pages, has a leisurely pace. It devotes four pages to Robert of Gloucester, a twelfth-century historian-poet little relished today but prized by eighteenth-century literary historians.³⁹ Robert Mannyng, another historian-poet scarcely mentioned in present-day literary histories and rarely if ever anthologized, occupies eight pages.⁴⁰ Chaucer and Gower rate just over three pages apiece.⁴¹ Gower (unlike, for example, Langland) does contribute some brief ‘specimens’ to volume 2, which covers poets with death-dates between 1400 (Chaucer) and 1628 (John Beaumont, recte 1627).⁴² But whereas Chaucer has ‘peculiar grace, and gaiety’ in Campbell’s estimation, and even the shadowy Langland ‘is the earliest of our writers in whom there is a tone of moral reflection’ and has ‘[t]he zeal of truth in him’, Gower comes off poorly in comparison.⁴³ For ‘though the placid and moral Gower might be a civilizing spirit among his contemporaries’, Campbell explains, ‘his character has none of the bold originality which stamps an influence on the literature of a country. He was not, like Chaucer, a patriarch in the family of genius’.⁴⁴ The structure of Confessio Amantis elicits particular scorn:

The design of his Confessio Amantis is peculiarly ill contrived. A lover, whose case has not a particle of interest, applies, according to the Catholic ritual, to a confessor, who, at the same time, whimsically enough, bears the additional character of a Pagan priest of Venus. . . A pretext is afforded by the ceremony of confession, for the priest not only to initiate his pupil in the duties of a lover, but in a wide range of ethical and physical knowledge; and at the mention of every virtue and vice, a tale is introduced by way of illustration. Does the confessor wish to warn the lover against impertinent curiosity? he introduces, apropos to that failing, the history of Actæon, of peeping memory. The confessor inquires if he is addicted to a vain-glorious disposition; because if he is, he can tell him a story about Nebuchadnezzar. Does he wish to hear of the virtue of conjugal patience? it is aptly inculcated by the anecdote respecting Socrates, who, when he received the contents of Xantippe’s pail upon his head, replied to the provocation with only a witticism. Thus, with shrieving, narrations, and didactic speeches, the work is extended to thirty thousand lines […].⁴⁵

In this passage, the Scottish Presbyterian’s distaste for ‘Catholic ritual’ including ‘shrieving’, that is, confession, mingles with the Romantic poet’s displeasure at opportunistic didacticism.⁴⁶ Campbell concludes by teaching Gower a poetry lesson: ‘in allegory Gower is cold and uninventive, and enumerates qualities, when he should conjure up visible objects. On the whole, though copiously stored with facts and fables, he is unable either to make truth appear poetical, or to render fiction the graceful vehicle of truth’.⁴⁷ With that damning chiasmus, part 1 of Campbell’s essay ends.

Campbell’s disdainful tone was not unprecedented. In Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753), Robert Shiels had offered no more about Gower’s literary value than one devastatingly tight-lipped comment: ‘poetry owes him few or no obligations’.⁴⁸ Nearer to Campbell’s time, the famously temperamental Joseph Ritson, in Bibliographia Poetica (1802), mentions poems of Gower ‘possessing little or no merit’.⁴⁹ However, this judgement refers strictly to the poet’s minor works. Ritson describes Confessio Amantis neutrally, if unenthusiastically, as ‘a prolix dialogue, of various argument, according to the fashion of his age’.⁵⁰ Not for beach readers, then. Chalmers, writing in 1810, finds Gower ‘far inferior to his great contemporary’. Gower ‘possessed the judgment of a critic, without the fire of a poet’.⁵¹ Still, Confessio Amantis ‘entitles him to a place among English poets’, and Chalmers’s edition was the first to print Confessio Amantis since the sixteenth century.⁵² Writing in the same year as Campbell, 1819, Ezekiel Sanford described Confessio Amantis as ‘one of the most fatiguing medlies of verse, that we were ever doomed to peruse’.⁵³ And in a signature cranky moment, Samuel Taylor Coleridge laments Chalmers’s inclusion of ‘the almost worthless Gower’. Coleridge would have preferred some Lydgate!⁵⁴

Conclusion: The unmaking of John Gower

Warton and Todd boosted Gower, whereas Campbell, with a sounder intuition for the tastes of future generations, took him down several pegs. More nineteenth-century readers and prospective editors shared Campbell’s opinion than Warton’s. Among the sour judgements upon Gower at the turn of the nineteenth century, I argue that Campbell’s was the one that made the most difference. His criticisms, lodged near the beginning of a much-reprinted anthology, may have contributed to the postponement of a first comprehensive edition of an acknowledged major early English poet for the rest of the century, until Macaulay took up the task — reluctantly.⁵⁵

Chalmers’s censure on Gower (‘the judgment of a critic, without the fire of a poet’) is acutely observed. It hits on a primary reason for the unmaking of Gower’s reputation in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. His judgemental, critical poetry tends not to be ‘poetical’ as postmedieval readers expected poetry to be. Gower’s aims were, if I can adopt his attitude for argument’s sake, loftier than ‘to make truth appear poetical’.⁵⁶ Gower suffered from a case of lyricization, that is, the process by which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers came to conflate lyric with poetry in general.⁵⁷

And then, the ideology of monolingual nationalism dictated that two thirds of Gower’s poetic output, and along with them his incomparably grand vision of a trilingual mega-poem, Mirour de l’omme–Vox Clamantis–Confessio Amantis, were ruled out of consideration.⁵⁸ No other early insular poet wrote with such facility and volubility in three different languages. No one else came close, really, as far as we know. Gower’s intention to draw together his three long poems into a single mega-poem is chiefly evident from three expressions of unity late in his career: the Latin colophons appended to several manuscripts of his work, incipit ‘Quia unusquisque’; the short Latin encomium ‘Eneidos Bucolis’, which refers to the three poems as a single ‘opus’ (work, 12); and the design of his tomb effigy, whose head rests on his trilingual trilogy.⁵⁹ Gower’s attitude toward his achievement in poetry is evident in a more general way from the self-similarity of topic and approach across the three poems. It is as if they were three legs of a stool or three panels of a triptych. Or as the entry for Gower in Biographia britannica put it: ‘All these three pieces which make the bulk of his works have a connection with, and a dependance [sic] on, each other, so as to appear manifestly efforts of the same genius’.⁶⁰ Without the French and Latin, Gower looked less ambitious, and chronologically later, than he in fact was. Thus it was that Campbell could describe Chaucer as ‘the earlier English poet’, on the grounds that Gower’s first poem in English, Confessio Amantis, postdated most of Chaucer’s works.⁶¹ Before John H. Fisher’s John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (1964), Gower’s French and Latin long poems, and his minor work, had rarely figured into a holistic assessment of his standing in literary history.⁶² If they had, reception history might have unfolded differently. Confessio Amantis seemed to Campbell insufficiently ‘poetical’. But ‘poetical’, as noted earlier, is exactly what Warton found Cinkante balades to be. In an era of advancing lyricization, a lyric sequence stood a better chance of winning praise. Gower’s Latin poetry, for those who can read it, unlocks a world of classical reference and political topicality. A theme of the entry for Gower in Biographia britannica is the strength of his French and Latin poems and the desirability of publishing them soon. ‘[I]f any votary to learning in that university, where most of [Gower’s shorter Latin poems] are to be found, would cause them to be transcribed, collated, and printed, the lovers of English history, and English literature, would be under great obligations to him’.⁶³ The reference is to the University of Oxford, whose Bodleian Library held and holds a number of manuscripts containing Gower’s French and Latin works. Eighteenth-century readers conceivably might have treasured Cinkante balades and Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz and Gower’s Latin poems too, if they had had them to read — and, of course, if they had been willing to consider French- and Latin-language poetry properly to belong to English literary history.

That Gower’s friend should have been the Ricardian poet who best anticipated modern tastes happened more by a series of historical accidents than we may prefer to believe, given the abiding Chaucer-centrism of Middle English studies today. For the depreciation of Gower, from which he is still recovering, we have Campbell, among others, to thank. Gower has had the last laugh. His English works and shorter French and Latin poems are all available today in inexpensive paperback student editions and form a part of undergraduate and graduate English curricula around the world.⁶⁴ The John Gower Society (1984–) holds triennial conferences focused on his work.⁶⁵ For students of Romanticism, Campbell has only ever been a decidedly minor poet.⁶⁶

1 For the early encomia of both authors by all the poets mentioned, and others, see N. W. Gilroy-Scott, ‘John Gower’s Reputation: Literary Allusions from the Early Fifteenth Century to the Time of “Pericles”’, Yearbook of English Studies, 1 (1971), 30–47. See also Henry J. Todd, Illustrations of the Lives and Writings of Gower and Chaucer Collected from Authentick Documents (London: Rivington, 1810), pp. xxvii–xxxii (including Foxe), and Derek Pearsall, ‘The Gower Tradition’, in Gower’s ‘Confessio Amantis’: Responses and Reassessments, ed. by A. J. Minnis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 179–97 (pp. 185–93) (including Leland). For Bale, see Oliver Wort, ‘Marian Literary Culture: Lydgate, his Heirs, and the End of Tragedy’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 121 (2022), 87–118 (p. 98). See also Helen Cooper, ‘“This worthy olde writer”: Pericles and Other Gowers, 1592–1640’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. by Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 99–113.

2 ‘Moral Gower’ [review of John Gower, The Complete Works, ed. by G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1899–1902), i (French works)], The Academy, 58 (1900), 180–81 (p. 180), quoted by Siân Echard, ‘The Long and the Short of It: On Gower’s Forms’, in John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception, ed. by Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 245–60 (p. 245).

3 Pearsall, ‘The Gower Tradition’, pp. 188–93; Siân Echard, ‘Introduction: Gower’s Reputation’, in Companion to Gower, ed. by Echard, pp. 1–22, passim, and ‘Gower in Print’, in Companion to Gower, ed. by Echard, pp. 115–35 (pp. 115–17); and Robert R. Edwards, ‘Gower’s Reception, 1400–1700’, in The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower, ed. by Ana Sáez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle, and R. F. Yeager (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 197–209 (pp. 203–209).

4 The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, ed. by Alexander Chalmers, 21 vols (London: Whittingham, 1810), ii, 1–*274 (Confessio Amantis, a reprint of Thomas Berthelette’s 1554 edition), and Robert [recte, William] Langland, Visio Will[ielm]i de Petro Plouhman, item Visiones ejusdem de Dowel, Dobet, et Dobest, ed. by Thomas Dunham Whitaker (London: Murray, 1813). Chalmers reproduces biographies from Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets with Critical Observations on their Works, 4 vols (London: Bathurst et al., 1781), where available and gives Johnson editor credit on his title page. The biography of Gower is marked as Chalmers’s.

5 Jo[hn] Gower, De confessione Amantis (London, 1554), published by Thomas Berthelette, and The Vision of Pierce Plowman (London, 1561), published by Owen Rogers.

6 See Kelsey Jackson Williams, ‘Canon before Canon, Literature before Literature: Thomas Pope Blount and the Scope of Early Modern Learning’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 77 (2014), 177–99.

7 Pearsall, ‘Gower Tradition’, p. 193.

8 Thomas Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets, 7 vols (London: Murray, 1819). All subsequent page references are to this, the first edition.

9 For example, Campbell is not mentioned once by David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Nor does Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets, appear in Siân Echard and Julie Lanz, ‘Appendix: A Chronology of Gower Criticism’, in Companion to Gower, ed. by Echard, pp. 251–73, either in the main criticism section or under ‘Editions and Selections’. Nor does Campbell come up in Echard, ‘Introduction’ or ‘Gower in Print’.

10 Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, unfinished in 4 vols (London: Dodsley, 1774–1781), and George Ellis, Specimens of the Early English Poets, 3 vols (London: Bulmer, 1801). Warton cited by Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets, i, 12 et passim. Ellis cited by Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets, i, 5 et passim.

11 Thomas Campbell, An Essay on English Poetry (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1819), Specimens of the British Poets (London: Murray, 1841, 1845), An Essay on English Poetry (London: Murray, 1848, 1861), Specimens of the British Poets (Philadelphia: Baird, 1853, 1854, 1855), and Specimens of the British Poets (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1869, 1874, 1875, 1881). All the reprints packaged the work as a single volume.

12 Warton, History of English Poetry, ii, g.1^v–h.1^v (addenda found at the back of the book), was the first to print substantial excerpts from Gower’s French poetry. Warton’s addenda are quoted at length by Works of the English Poets, ed. by Chalmers, ii, vii–xii, and Todd, Illustrations of the Lives and Writings, pp. 95–108. Gower’s Vox clamantis was first printed along with Cronica tripertita, for the Roxburghe Club, as Joh[n] Gower, Poema quod dicitur Vox clamantis necnon Chronica tripartita, ed. by H. O. Coxe (London: Nicol, 1850). Gower’s major French poem, Mirour de l’Omme, was not identified as his and printed until Gower, Complete Works, ed. by Macaulay, i (1899). A handful of the shorter Latin poems had appeared incidentally in the early editions of Chaucer, and a few more in Poema quod dicitur Vox clamantis, ed. by Coxe, and Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, ed. by Thomas Wright, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1859–1861), i, 346–63, 417–54, ii, 1–3, but the full complement was not printed until Gower, Complete Works, ed. by Macaulay, iv (1902). The contents of BL MS Additional 59495 (‘Trentham’), including Cinkante balades, was printed for the Roxburghe Club one year before Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets, as John Gower, Balades and Other Poems[, ed. by George Granville Leveson-Gower] (London: Bulmer, 1818).

13 E[lizabeth] Cooper, The Muses Library: Or a Series of English Poetry, from the Saxons, to the Reign of King Charles II (London: Wilcox et al., 1737), p. 19.

14 Biographia britannica, 7 vols (London: Innys et al., 1747–1766), pp. 2242, 2243. The work is through-paginated.

15 Ibid., pp. 2249–50.

16 Thomas Tanner, Bibliotheca britannico-hibernica, ed. by David Wilkins (London: Bowyer, 1748), originated as a planned editio princeps of John Leland’s manuscript catalogue of insular writers, Commentarii de scriptoribus britannicis, which survives in manuscript at Oxford. Translation mine. Entries for Gower and many other authors in Bibliotheca britannico-hibernica present Leland’s text with Tanner’s footnotes. See Richard Sharpe, ‘Thomas Tanner (1674–1735), the 1697 Catalogue, and Bibliotheca Britannica’, The Library, 6 (2005), 381–421 (esp. pp. 404–405). On Leland’s passage on Gower in its original context, see Yoshiko Kobayashi, ‘In Praise of European Peace: Gower’s Verse Epistle in Thynne’s 1532 Edition of Chaucer’s Workes’, in John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, ed. by Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), pp. 231–46 (pp. 231–32).

17 All quotations since the previous note are from Tanner, Bibliotheca britannico-hibernica, ed. by Wilkins, p. 335.

18 Ellis, Specimens of the Early English Poets, i, 177–78.

19 Ellis, Specimens of the Early English Poets, i, 178 (rationale), 179–98 (Tale of Florent). I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for Leeds Medieval Studies for pointing out Ellis’s motive in selecting the Tale of Florent. See also Echard, ‘Introduction’, p. 15.

20 Ellis, Specimens of the Early English Poets, i, 179.

21 Todd, Illustrations of the Lives and Writings, p. 111, ascribes the Gower entry in Biographia britannica to ‘Campbell’, that is, John Campbell, one of the principal contributors to the work (no relation to Thomas Campbell). I have been unable to confirm the attribution. John Campbell is known to have written the entry for Chaucer in Biographia britannica.

22 Thomas Warton, Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser (London: Dodsley, 1754), p. 90 n.

23 Ibid., p. 228.

24 Warton, History of English Poetry, ii, 1.

25 Ibid., ii, 9.

26 Ibid., ii, 31.

27 Warton, History of English Poetry, ii, g.3^v (addenda found at the back of the book), copied by Todd, Illustrations of the Lives and Writings, p. 102.

28 Warton, History of English Poetry, ii, 50.

29 Ibid., i, 343.

30 Ellis, Specimens of the Early English Poets, i, 131. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, Lydgate’s name was often annexed to those of Chaucer and Gower in literary encomia, forming with them a triumvirate of early English poetic father figures.

31 To the following cf. Echard, ‘Gower in Print’, pp. 118–20, and Siân Echard, Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 105–109. Echard notes that Todd included Gower, among other reasons, to flatter his patron, George Granville Leveson-Gower, whose family claimed the fourteenth-century poet as a relation. As Echard also notes, Todd, Illustrations of the Lives and Writings, contains rather more Chaucer than Gower by volume; the book’s Gower dimension nonetheless marks a departure from previously available materials.

32 Todd, Illustrations of the Lives and Writings, unpaginated dedication. Todd cited by Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets, ii, 50.

33 Todd, Illustrations of the Lives and Writings, p. xlvii.

34 Ibid., pp. 158–59.

35 Works of the English Poets, ed. by Chalmers, and Todd, Illustrations of the Lives and Writings, pp. xxii–xxiii (quotation).

36 Ibid., pp. xxvi–xxvii.

37 Ibid., pp. xii–xvii.

38 See Geoffrey Carnall, ‘Campbell, Thomas (1777–1844)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/4534.

39 Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets, i, 39–42. See Jeff Strabone, ‘The Afterlife of Annotation: How Robert of Gloucester Became the Founding Father of English Poetry’, in Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. by Michael Edson (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2017), pp. 47–66. First edited in 1724, Robert of Gloucester’s chronicle had been a surprisingly central historical source for John Weever, Ancient Fvnerall Monvments with in the Vnited Monarchie of Great Britaine, Ireland, and the Ilands Adiacent (London: Harper, 1631). See Graham Parry, ‘John Weever: Antiquary and Medievalist’, Leeds Studies in English, 9 (1977), 84–96 (pp. 90, 95).

40 Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets, i, 42–49.

41 Ibid., i, 70–73 (Chaucer), 73–76 (Gower).

42 Ibid., ii, 50–58.

43 Ibid., i, 69 (second and third quotations), 71 (first quotation).

44 Ibid., i, 73–74.

45 Ibid., i, 74–75.

46 As a young man, Campbell had thought to enter the ministry of the Church of Scotland. See Carnall, ‘Campbell, Thomas’.

47 Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets, i, 75–76.

48 [Theophilus] Cibber [in actuality, Robert Shiels], The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 5 vols (London: Griffiths, 1753), i, 22.

49 [Joseph Ritson], Bibliographia Poetica: A Catalogue of Engleish [sic] Poets, of the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth, Centurys (London: Roworth, 1802), p. 25, repeated by Works of the English Poets, ed. by Chalmers, ii, v. Ritson, Bibliographia Poetica, p. 25 n. †, concedes that ‘His Vox Clamantis might have deserved publication’ if Gower had not ungratefully turned against Richard II, repeating an argument of Thomas Hearne. Ritson cited by Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets, i, 57 et passim.

50 Ritson, Bibliographia Poetica, p. 24.

51 Both quotations since the previous note are from Works of the English Poets, ed. by Chalmers, ii, iii. Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets, ii, 51, echoes Chalmers when he concludes his headnote to Gower, ‘His writings exhibit all the crude erudition and science of his age; a knowledge sufficient to have been the fuel of genius, if Gower had possessed its fire’.

52 Works of the English Poets, ed. by Chalmers, ii, v.

53 The Works of the British Poets with Lives of the Authors, ed. by Ezekiel Sanford, 25 vols (Philadelphia: Mitchell, Ames, & White, 1819), i, 220. However, ibid., i, 219, parrots Chalmers’s claim about ‘a place among the English poets’. (Sanford adds the.)

54 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Literary Remains, ed. by Henry Nelson Coleridge, 4 vols (London: Pickering, 1836–1839), ii, 130.

55 Called upon by the Delegates of Oxford University Press to produce a comprehensive, that is, trilingual, Gower edition, Macaulay included the French and Latin works ‘with some hesitation, which was due partly to [his] feeling that the English text was the only one really needed’. See Gower, Complete Works, ed. by Macaulay, i, vi. Macaulay’s tepid opinion of Gower as a poet was of a piece with earlier condemnations. See Pearsall, ‘Gower Tradition’, pp. 194–95, and Echard, ‘Gower in Print’, pp. 131–33.

56 Pearsall, ‘Gower Tradition’, p. 194 (‘poetical’ a keyword in Reinhold Pauli’s and Macaulay’s opprobrium of Gower’s literary merit in their respective editions). See John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. by Reinhold Pauli, 3 vols (London: Bell & Daldy, 1857).

57 See Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 8–10, ‘Who Reads Poetry?’, PMLA, 123 (2008), 181–87, ‘Lyric’, in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. by Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, and Paul Rouzer, 4th edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 826–34, and Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023). Jackson’s ‘lyricization’ extends a phrase of Mary Poovey, ‘The Model System of Contemporary Literary Criticism’, Critical Inquiry, 27 (2001), 403–38 (p. 422).

58 See Echard, ‘Introduction’, pp. 12–14.

59 Quoted from John Gower, The Minor Latin Works, ed. and trans. by R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2005). On the authorship of ‘Eneidos Bucolis’, ascribed to ‘a philosopher [quidam Philosophus]’ but probably too glowing to have been written by anyone but Gower himself, see Gower, Minor Latin Works, ed. and trans. by Yeager, p. 83.

60 Biographia britannica, p. 2243.

61 Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets, i, 73, ii, 14n1 (quotation).

62 John H. Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York: New York University Press, 1964). The revaluation of Gower’s French and Latin works is a critical undertaking still incomplete. But see R. F. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990); John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation and Tradition, ed. by Elisabeth Dutton with John Hines and Yeager (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010); and David R. Carlson, Gower and Anglo-Latin Verse (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2021).

63 Biographia britannica, p. 2248 n. g.

64 John Gower, In Praise of Peace, ed. by Michael Livingston (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2005), Minor Latin Works, ed. by Yeager, Confessio Amantis, ed. by Russell A. Peck with Latin translations by Andrew Galloway, 2nd edn [partial], 3 vols (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2006–2013) [vol. 3 not reedited], and The French Balades, ed. and trans. by R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2011). The latter edition includes both Cinkante balades and Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz.

65 https://johngower.org/>.

66 See Peter S. Macaulay, ‘Thomas Campbell: A Revaluation’, English Studies, 50 (1969), 39–46.