I was looking for something today and you know how that goes. Miss M suggested Narnia. I went to the room in which Narnia should live and did not see it. Fortunately, I have an uncatalogued auxiliary library in the Apartment.

Interestingly, today was the second in as many days that I have had to trundle up there to retrieve a book I do not have in the big house. (Thank you, J-Man for leaving your Cassell’s Latin Dictionary and Daughter C for Narnia.) Sure enough there was Narnia. And yes! I did take it back to the Apartment. I’m on day two of still seeing the surface of my desk.

Having found what I was looking for, I picked up The Child and His Book: Some Account of the History and Progress of Children’s Literature in England (Mrs. E.M. Fields, 1891) to look for something else. Not anything specific, mind you, just something else and I’ll know it when I see it.

In practice this noble scheme of study often dwindled to a little Latin grammar, learnt generally from small and meager text-books from the works of the great grammarians Donatus and Priscian. On these all grammars till the days of Whytington and Lily were founded, and donate of donet was a name in common use for the grammar text-book. Thus in Piers Plowman—

“Than dorowe me among draperes my donet for to learne.”

This was not what I was looking for but it occurred to me that I do not know anything about Piers Plowman. Easy enough to correct, right? Wrong. Never rely on that infallible source when you have the book right over there on a little shelf by the back door. The preface of my 1912 edition told me everything I needed to know.

It has this to say about the author, William Langland (which in 1912 was somewhat disputed):

If we try to reconstruct from a careful reading what 
manner of man or men penned these visions, we might 
arrive at some picture like the following. They were or he 
was a man who loved the country for its birds and flowers, 
but loved London better for its people; who had been to 
school and read and remembered eagerly and lovingly, 
with greater intelligence than care, the Latin Bible and the 
Latin Fathers; who lived a precarious, poor, tramping 
life of mass or chantry priest, earning little and continually consorting, partly by choice and partly by necessity, in the most intimate way, with friars, theologians, merchants, pilgrims, beggars, drunkards, loose women, and with the honest and hard-working poor;
[Continued below the fold. Read it. Worth it.]

Everything except who Turgeniev was though I imagine it could be one of the dreamers. But it doesn’t matter because tomorrow my fountain pen arrives and I’m going to see if I can write in script like that. Daughter C left some script books around here somewhere. I think I know where they are.

That’s it for your mid-Sunday diversion. You’ll excuse me while I go return Piers Plowman to it shelf.

who knew all the tricks of shop and cheaping, of mendicancy and mendacity ; who was not averse from honest idleness, and who was stung to penitence and indignation by what he saw, heard, and felt in himself and in those around him; who hated the trickery, the aristocracy, and intricacies of law which he did not understand, and who loved the scenes in the 
gentleman's dining-hall and in the taverns, where he was 
quite at home; who abhorred — perhaps with envy — the 
easy life of the rich noble and the fat priest; who by his 
reading, his monastic training, and his own poverty 
imagined that the saviour of society would come from and 
belong to the only class he thoroughly understood; who 
wrote roughly the rough alliterative verse, indigenous to the land and very pedestrian, but who in his inspired hours, 
which were many, almost rose, notwithstanding his awkward 
tools, to the spiritual heights of Bunyan and Shelley and 
to the poetic heights of the Old Testament prophets. Like 
Bunyan and Shelley, he lived in stormy times; like them, 
he had, as an individual, been through some of the moral 
cataclysms of which he spoke; like them, he was prone to 
fall, but ready to rise; but he did not use the nervous 
beauty of Bunyans prose or the metaphysical wings of 
Shelleys scholarship, strengthened by his unearthly and 
Titanic force. This, however, was his advantage, for his 
work was capable of being enlarged and successfully 
imitated. For he wrote for the ordinary man, who, 
whether he be king or baron, bishop or pardoner, merchant 
or Lombard, hermit or pilgrim, knight or knave, may, if 
his heart counsel him, echo the last words: 
" I will become a pilgrim. 
And wend as wide as the world lasteth 
To seek — Piers Plowman."