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The _Dunciad_ is an instance of the mock-epic utilized for the purposes
of satire. Here Pope, as regards theme, possibly had the idea suggested
to him by Dryden's _MacFlecknoe_, but undoubtedly the heroic couplet,
which the latter had first applied to satire and used with such
conspicuous success, was still further polished and improved by Pope
until, as Mr. Courthope says, "it became in his hands a rapier of
perfect flexibility and temper". From the time of Pope until that of
Byron this stately measure has been regarded as the metre best suited
_par excellence_ for the display of satiric point and brilliancy, and
as the medium best calculated to confer dignity on political satire.
The _Dunciad_, while personal malice enters into it, must not be
regarded as, properly speaking, a malicious satire. From a literary
censor's point of view almost every lash Pope administered was richly
deserved. In this respect Pope has all Horace's fairness and
moderation, while at the same time he exhibits not a little of
Juvenal's depth of conviction that desperate diseases demand radical
remedies.[19]

By the side of Pope stands an impressive but a mournful figure, one of
the most tragic in our literature, to think of whom, as Thackeray says,
"is like thinking of the ruin of a great empire". As an all-round
satirist Jonathan Swift has no superior save Dryden, and he only by
virtue of his broader human sympathies. In the works of the great Dean
we have many distinct forms of satire. Scarce anything he wrote, with
the exception of his unfortunate _History of the Last Four Years of
Queen Anne_, but is marked by satiric touches that relieve the tedium
of even its dullest pages. He has utilized nearly all the recognized
modes of satiric composition throughout the range of his long list of
works. In the _Tale of a Tub_ he employed the vehicle of the satiric
tale to lash the Dissenters, the Papists, and even the Church of
England; in a word, the cant of religion as well as the pretensions of
letters and the shams of the world. In the _Battle of the Books_ the
parody or travesty of the Romances of Chivalry is used to ridicule the
controversy raging between Temple, Wotton, Boyle, and Bentley,
regarding the comparative merits of ancient and modern writers. In
_Gulliver's Travels_ the fictitious narrative or mock journal is
impressed into the service, the method consisting in adopting an absurd
supposition at the outset and then gravely deducing the logical effects
which follow. These three form the trio of great prose satires which
from the epoch of their publication until now have remained the wonder
and the delight of successive generations. Their realism, humorous
invention, ready wit, unsparing irony, and keen ridicule have exercised
as potent an attraction as their gloomy misanthropy has repelled. Among
minor satires are his scathing attacks in prose and verse on the war
party as a ring of Whig stock-jobbers, such as _Advice to the October
Club_, _Public Spirit of the Whigs, &c._, the _Virtues of Sid Hamet_,
_The Magician's Wand_ (directed against Godolphin); his _Polite
Conversations_ and _Directions to Servants_ are savage attacks on the
inanity of society small-talk and the greed of the menials of the
period. But why prolong the list? From the _Drapier's Letters_,
directed against a supposed fraudulent introduction of a copper
currency known as "Wood's Halfpence", to his skit on _The Furniture of
a Woman's Mind_, there were few topics current in his day, whether in
politics, theology, economics, or social gossip, which he did not
attack with the artillery of his wit and satire. Had he been less
sardonic, had he possessed even a modicum of the _bonhomie_ of his
friend Arbuthnot, Swift's satire would have exercised even more potent
an influence than it has been its fortune to achieve.

Pope died in 1744, Swift in 1745. During their last years there were
signs that the literary modes of the epoch of Queen Anne, which had
maintained their ascendency so long, were rapidly losing their hold on
the popular mind. A new literary period was about to open wherein new
literary ideals and new models would prevail. Satire, in common with
literature as a whole, felt the influence of the transitional era. As
we have seen, it concerned itself largely with ridiculing the follies
and eccentricities of men of letters and foolish pretenders to the
title; also in lashing social vices and abuses. The political enmity
existing between the Jacobites and the Hanoverians continued to afford
occasion for the exchange of party squibs and lampoons. The lengthened
popularity of Gay's _Beggars' Opera_, a composition wherein a new mode
was created, viz. the satiric opera (the prototype of the comic opera
of later days), affords an index to the temper of the time. It was the
age of England's lethargy.

After the defeat of Culloden, satire languished for a while, to revive
again during the ministry of the Earl of Bute, when everything Scots
came in for condemnation, and when Smollett and John Wilkes belaboured
each other in the _Briton_ and the _North Briton_, in pamphlet,
pasquinade, and parody, until at last Lord Bute withdrew from the
contest in disgust, and suspended the organ over which the author of
_Roderick Random_ presided. The satirical effusions of this epoch are
almost entirely worthless, the only redeeming feature being the fact
that Goldsmith was at that very moment engaged in throwing off those
delicious _morceaux_ of social satire contained in _The Citizen of the
World_. Johnson, a few years before, had set the fashion for some time
with his two satires written in free imitation of Juvenal--_London_,
and _The Vanity of Human Wishes_. But from 1760 onward until the close
of the century, when Ellis, Canning, and Frere opened what may be
termed the modern epoch of satire, the influence paramount was that of
Goldsmith. Fielding and Smollett were both satirists of powerful and
original stamp, but they were so much else besides that their influence
was lost in that of the genial author of the _Deserted Village_ and
_Retaliation_. His _Vicar of Wakefield_ is a satire, upon sober,
moderate principles, against the vice of the upper classes, as typified
in the character of Mr. Thornhill, while the sketch of Beau Tibbs in
_The Citizen of the World_ is a racy picture of the out-at-elbows,
would-be man of fashion, who seeks to pose as a social leader and
arbiter of taste when he had better have been following a trade.

The next revival of the popularity of satire takes place towards the
commencement of the third last decade of the eighteenth century, when,
using the vehicle of the epistolary mode, an anonymous writer, whose
identity is still in dispute, attacked the monarch, the government,
and the judicature of the country, in a series of letters in which
scathing invective, merciless ridicule, and lofty scorn were united to
vigour and polish of style, as well as undeniable literary taste.

After the appearance of the _Letters of Junius_, which, perhaps, have
owed the permanence of their popularity as much to the interest
attaching to the mystery of their authorship as to their intrinsic
merits, political satire may be said to have once more slumbered
awhile. The impression produced by the studied malice of the _Letters_,
and the epigrammatic suggestiveness which appeared to leave as much
unsaid as was said, was enormous, yet, strangely enough, they were
unable to check the growing influence of the school of satire whereof
Goldsmith was the chief founder, and from which the fashionable _jeux
d'esprit_, the sparkling _persiflage_ of the society _flaneurs_ of the
nineteenth century are the legitimate descendants.[20] The decade
1768-78, therefore--that decade when the plays of Goldsmith and
Sheridan were appearing,--witnessed the rise and the development of
that genial, humorous raillery, in prose and verse, of personal foibles
and of social abuses, of which the _Retaliation_ and the Beau Tibbs
papers are favourable examples. These were the distinguishing
characteristics of our satiric literature during the closing decade of
the eighteenth century until the horrors of the French Revolution, and
the sympathy with it which was apparently being aroused in England,
called political satire into requisition once more. Party feeling ran
high with regard to the principles enunciated by the so-called "friends
of freedom". The sentiments of the "Constitutional Tories" found
expression in the bitter, sardonic, vitriolic mockery visible in the
pages of the _Anti-Jacobin_,[21] which did more to check the progress of
nascent Radicalism and the movement in favour of political reform than
any other means employed. Chief-justice Mansfield's strictures and Lord
Braxfield's diatribes alike paled into insignificance beside these
deadly, scorching bombs of Juvenal-like vituperation, which have
remained unapproached in their specific line. As an example take
Ellis's _Ode to Jacobinism_, of which I quote two stanzas:--

"Daughter of Hell, insatiate power!
Destroyer of the human race,
Whose iron scourge and maddening hour
Exalt the bad, the good debase;
When first to scourge the sons of earth,
Thy sire his darling child designed,
Gallia received the monstrous birth,
Voltaire informed thine infant mind.
Well-chosen nurse, his sophist lore,
He bade thee many a year explore,
He marked thy progress firm though slow,
And statesmen, princes, leagued with their inveterate foe.
Scared at thy frown terrific, fly
The morals (antiquated brood),
Domestic virtue, social joy,
And faith that has for ages stood;
Swift they disperse and with them go
The friend sincere, the generous foe--
Traitors to God, to man avowed,
By thee now raised aloft, now crushed beneath the crowd."

Space only remains for a single word upon the satire of the nineteenth
century. In this category would be included the _Baeviad_ and the
_Maeviad_ by William Gifford (editor of the _Anti-Jacobin_), which,
though first printed in the closing years of the eighteenth century,
were issued in volume form in 1800. Written as they are in avowed
imitation of Juvenal, Persius, and Horace, they out-Juvenal Juvenal by
the violence of the language, besides descending to a depth of personal
scurrility as foreign to the nature of true satire as abuse is alien to
wit. They have long since been consigned to merited oblivion, though in
their day, from the useful and able work done by their author in other
fields of literature, they enjoyed no inconsiderable amount of fame.
Two or three lines from the _Baeviad_ will give a specimen of its
quality:--

"For mark, to what 'tis given, and then declare,
Mean though I am, if it be worth my care.
Is it not given to Este's unmeaning dash,
To Topham's fustian, Reynold's flippant trash,
To Andrews' doggerel where three wits combine,
To Morton's catchword, Greathead's idiot line,
And Holcroft's Shug-lane cant and Merry's Moorfields Whine?"[22]

The early years of the present century still felt the influence of the
sardonic ridicule which prevailed during the closing years of the
previous one, and the satirists who appeared during the first decades
of the former belonged to the robust or energetic order. Their names
and their works are well-nigh forgotten.

We now reach the last of the greater satirists that have adorned our
literature, one who is in many respects a worthy peer of Dryden, Swift,
and Pope. Lord Byron's fame as a satirist rests on three great works,
each of them illustrative of a distinct type of composition. Other
satires he has written, nay, the satiric quality is present more or
less in nearly all he produced; but _The Vision of Judgment_, _Beppo_,
and _Don Juan_ are his three masterpieces in this style of literature.
They are wonderful compositions in every sense of the word. The
sparkling wit, the ready raillery, the cutting irony, the biting
sarcasm, and the sardonic cynicism which characterize almost every line
of them are united to a brilliancy of imagination, a swiftness as well
as a felicity of thought, and an epigrammatic terseness of phrase which
even Byron himself has equalled nowhere else in his works. _The Vision
of Judgment_ is an example in the first instance of parody, and, in the
second, but not by any means so distinctly, of allegory. Its savage
ferocity of sarcasm crucified Southey upon the cross of scornful
contempt. Byron is not as good a metrist as a satirist, and the _Ottava
rima_ in his hands sometimes halts a little; still, the poem is a
notable example of a satiric parody written with such distinguished
success in a measure of great technical difficulty.

It is somewhat curious that all three of Byron's great satiric poems
should be written in the same measure. Yet so it is, for the poet,
having become enamoured of the metre after reading Frere's clever
satire, _Whistlecraft_, ever afterwards had a peculiar fondness for
it. Both _Beppo_ and _Don Juan_ are also excellent examples of the
metrical "satiric tale". The former, being the earlier satire of the
two, was Byron's first essay in this new type of satiric composition.
His success therein stimulated him to attempt another "tale" which in
some respects presents features that ally it to the mock-epic. _Beppo_
is a perfect storehouse of well-rounded satirical phrases that cleave
to the memory, such as "the deep damnation of his 'bah'" and the
description of the "budding miss",

"So much alarmed that she is quite alarming,
All giggle, blush, half pertness and half pout".

_Beppo_ leads up to _Don Juan_, and it is hard to say which is the
cleverer satire of the two. In both, the wit is so unforced and
natural, the fun so sparkling, the banter and the persiflage so bright
and scintillating, that they seem, as Sir Walter Scott said, to be the
natural outflow from the fountain of humour. Byron's earliest satire,
_English Bards and Scots Reviewers_, is a clever piece of work, but
compared with the great trio above-named is a production of his nonage.

Byron was succeeded by Praed, whose social pictures are instinct with
the most refined and polished raillery, with the true Attic salt of wit
united to a metrical deftness as graceful as it was artistic. During
Praed's lifetime, Lamb with his inimitable _Essays of Elia_, Southey,
Barham with the ever-popular _Ingoldsby Legends_, James and Horace
Smith with the _Rejected Addresses_, Disraeli, Leigh Hunt, Tom Hood,
and Landor had been winning laurels in various branches of social
satire which, consequent upon the influence of Byron and then of his
disciple, Praed, became the current mode. A favourable example of that
style is found in Leigh Hunt's _Feast of the Poets_ and in Edward
Fitz-Gerald's _Chivalry at a Discount_. Other writers of satire in the
earlier decades of the present century were Peacock, who in his novels
(_Crotchet Castle_, &c.) evolved an original type of satire based upon
the Athenian New Comedy. Miss Austen in her English novels and Miss
Edgeworth in her Irish tales employed satire to impeach certain crying
social abuses, as also did Dickens in _Oliver Twist_ and others of his
books. Douglas Jerrold's comedies and sketches are full of titbits of
gay and brilliant banter and biting irony. If _Sartor Resartus_ could
be regarded as a satire, as Dr. Garnett says, Carlyle would be the
first of satirists, with his thundering invective, grand rhetoric,
indignant scorn, grim humour, and satiric gloom in denouncing the shams
of human society and of human nature. An admirable American school of
satire was founded by Washington Irving, of which Judge Haliburton (Sam
Slick), Paulding, Holmes, Artemus Ward, and Dudley Warner are the chief
names.

Since the third and fourth decades of our century, in other words,
since the epoch of the Reform Bill and the Chartist agitation, satire
has more and more tended to lose its acid and its venom, to slough the
dark sardonic sarcasm of past days and to don the light sportive garb
of the social humorist and epigrammist. Robustious bludgeoning has gone
out of fashion, and in its place we have the playful satiric wit,
sparkling as of well-drawn Moet or Clicquot, of Mortimer Collins, H.S.
Leigh, Arthur Locker and Frederick Locker-Lampson, W.S. Gilbert, Austin
Dobson, Bret Harte, F. Anstey, Dr. Walter C. Smith, and many other
graceful and delightful social satirists whose verses are household
words amongst us. From week to week also there appear in the pages of
that trenchant social censor, _Punch_, and the other high-class
comico-satiric journals, many pieces of genuine and witty social
satire. Every year the demand seems increasing, and yet the supply
shows no signs of running dry.

Political satire, in its metrical form, has had from time to time a
temporary revival of popularity in such compositions as James Russell
Lowell's inimitable _Biglow Papers_, as well as in more recent volumes,
of which Mr. Owen Seaman's verse is an example; while are not its prose
forms legion in the pages of our periodical press? It has, however, now
lost that vitriolic quality which made it so scorching and offensively
personal. The man who wrote nowadays as did Dryden, and Junius, and
Canning, or, in social satire, as did Peter Pindar and Byron, would be
forthwith ostracized from literary fellowship.

But what more need be said of an introductory character to these
selections that are now placed before the reader? English satire,
though perhaps less in evidence to-day as a separate department in
letters, is still as cardinal a quality as ever in the productions of
our leading authors. If satires are no longer in fashion, satire is
perennial as an attribute in literature, and we have every reason to
cherish it and welcome it as warmly as of old. The novels of Thackeray,
as I have already said, contain some of the most delicately incisive
shafts of satire that have been barbed by any writer of the present
century. "George Eliot", also, though in a less degree, has shown
herself a satirist of much power and pungency, while others of our
latter-day novelists manifest themselves as possessed of a faculty of
satire both virile and trenchant. It is one of the indispensable
qualities of a great writer's style, because its quarry is one of the
most widely diffused of existing things on the face of the globe. There
is no age without its folly, no epoch without its faults. So long,
therefore, as man and his works are imperfect, so long shall there be
existent among us abuses, social, political, professional, and
ecclesiastical, and so long, too, shall it be the province and the
privilege of those who feel themselves called upon to play the
difficult part of _censor morum_, to prick the bubbles of falsehood,
vanity, and vice with the shafts of ridicule and raillery.

[Footnote 1: _The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century_.]

[Footnote 2: Cf. Lenient, _History of French Satire_.]

[Footnote 3: Thomson's _Ante-Augustan Latin Poetry_.]

[Footnote 4: Cf. Mackail; Paten, _Etudes sur la Poesie latine_.]

[Footnote 5: See Skeat's "Langland" in _Encyclop. Brit._]

[Footnote 6: See Arber's Reprints for 1868.]

[Footnote 7: Arber's Select Reprints.]

[Footnote 8: _Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury_.]

[Footnote 9: This, of course, was Marston.]

[Footnote 10: From the Fifth Satire in _The Metamorphosis of
Pygmalion's Image and Certain Satyres_, by John Marston. 1598.]

[Footnote 11: _Pasquil's Madcappe: Thrown at the Corruption of these
Times_--1626. Breton, to be read at all, ought to be studied in the two
noble volumes edited by Dr. A.B. Grosart. From his edition I quote.]

[Footnote 12: _English Literature_, by Prof. Craik. Hannay's _Satires
and Satirists_.]

[Footnote 13: _Life of Dryden_, by Sir Walter Scott. Saintsbury's _Life
of Dryden_.]

[Footnote 14: Thackeray's _English Humorists_. Hannay's _Satires and
Satirists_.]

[Footnote 15: _Satire and Satirists_, by James Hannay. Lecture III.]

[Footnote 16: Dowden's _French Literature_.]

[Footnote 17: Minto's _Characteristics of English Poets_.]

[Footnote 18: Cf. Saintsbury's _Life of Dryden_.]

[Footnote 19: Cf. Gosse, _Eighteenth Century Literature_.]

[Footnote 20: Thackeray's _English Humorists_.]

[Footnote 21: _The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin_--Carisbrooke Library,
1890.]

[Footnote 22: _The Baeviad and the Maeviad_, by W. Gifford, Esq., 1800.]




ENGLISH SATIRES.


WILLIAM LANGLAND.

(1330?-1400?)


I. PILGRIMAGE IN SEARCH OF DO-WELL.

This opening satire constitutes the whole of the Eighth _Passus_ of
_Piers Plowman's Vision_ and the First of Do-Wel. The "Dreamer"
here sets off on a new pilgrimage in search of a person who has not
appeared in the poem before--Do-Well. The following is the argument
of the _Passus_.--"All Piers Plowman's inquiries after Do-Well are
fruitless. Even the friars to whom he addresses himself give but a
confused account; and weary with wandering about, the dreamer is
again overtaken by slumber. Thought now appears to him, and
recommends him to Wit, who describes to him the residence of
Do-Well, Do-Bet, Do-Best, and enumerates their companions and
attendants."


Thus y-robed in russet . romed I aboute
Al in a somer seson . for to seke Do-wel;
And frayned[23] full ofte . of folk that I mette
If any wight wiste . wher Do-wel was at inne;
And what man he myghte be . of many man I asked.
Was nevere wight, as I wente . that me wisse kouthe[24]
Where this leode lenged,[25] . lasse ne moore.[26]
Til it bifel on a Friday . two freres I mette
Maisters of the Menours[27] . men of grete witte.
I hailsed them hendely,[28] . as I hadde y-lerned.
And preede them par charite, . er thei passed ferther,
If thei knew any contree . or costes as thei wente,
"Where that Do-wel dwelleth . dooth me to witene".
For thei be men of this moolde . that moost wide walken,
And knowen contrees and courtes, . and many kynnes places,
Bothe princes paleises . and povere mennes cotes,[29]
And Do-wel and Do-yvele . where thei dwelle bothe.
"Amonges us" quod the Menours, . "that man is dwellynge,
And evere hath as I hope, . and evere shal herafter."
"_Contra_", quod I as a clerc, . and comsed to disputen,
And seide hem soothly, . "_Septies in die cadit justus_".
"Sevene sithes,[30] seeth the book . synneth the rightfulle;
And who so synneth," I seide, . "dooth yvele, as me thynketh;
And Do-wel and Do-yvele . mowe noght dwelle togideres.
Ergo he nis noght alway . among you freres:
He is outher while ellis where . to wisse the peple."
"I shal seye thee, my sone" . seide the frere thanne,
"How seven sithes the sadde man, . on a day synneth;
By a forbisne"[31] quod the frere, . "I shal thee faire showe.
Lat brynge a man in a boot, . amydde the brode watre;
The wynd and the water . and the boot waggyng,
Maketh the man many a tyme . to falle and to stonde;
For stonde he never so stif, . he stumbleth if he meve,
Ac yet is he saaf and sound, . and so hym bihoveth;
For if he ne arise the rather, . and raughte to the steere,
The wynd wolde with the water . the boot over throwe;
And thanne were his lif lost, . thorough lackesse of hymselve[32].
And thus it falleth," quod the frere, . "by folk here on erthe;
The water is likned to the world . that wanyeth and wexeth;
The goodes of this grounde arn like . to the grete wawes,
That as wyndes and wedres . walketh aboute;
The boot is likned to oure body . that brotel[33] is of kynde,
That thorough the fend and the flesshe . and the frele worlde
Synneth the sadde man . a day seven sithes.
Ac[34] dedly synne doth he noght, . for Do-wel hym kepeth;
And that is Charite the champion, . chief help ayein Synne;
For he strengtheth men to stonde, . and steereth mannes soule,
And though the body bowe . as boot dooth in the watre,
Ay is thi soul saaf, . but if thou wole thiselve
Do a deedly synne, . and drenche so thi soule,
God wole suffre wel thi sleuthe[35] . if thiself liketh.
For he yaf thee a yeres-gyve,[36] . to yeme[37] wel thiselve,
And that is wit and free-wil, . to every wight a porcion,
To fleynge foweles, . to fisshes and to beastes:
Ac man hath moost thereof, . and moost is to blame,
But if he werch wel therwith, . as Do-wel hym techeth."
"I have no kynde knowyng,"[38] quod I, . "to conceyven alle your wordes:
Ac if I may lyve and loke, . I shall go lerne bettre."
"I bikenne thee Christ,"[39] quod he, . "that on cros deyde!"
And I seide "the same . save you fro myschaunce,
And gyve you grace on this grounde . goode men to worthe!"[40]
And thus I wente wide wher . walkyng myn one,[41]
By a wilderness, . and by a wodes side:
Blisse of the briddes.[42] . Broughte me a-slepe,
And under a lynde upon a launde[43] . lened I a stounde[44],
To lythe the layes . the lovely foweles made,
Murthe of hire mowthes . made me ther to slepe;
The merveillouseste metels[45] . mette me[46] thanne
That ever dremed wight . in worlde, as I wene.
A muche man, as me thoughte . and like to myselve,
Cam and called me . by my kynde name.
"What artow," quod I tho, . "that thow my name knowest."
"That woost wel," quod he, . "and no wight bettre."
"Woot I what thou art?" . "Thought," seide he thanne;
"I have sued[47] thee this seven yeer, . seye[48] thou me no rather."[49]
"Artow Thought," quod I thoo, . "thow koudest me wisse,
Where that Do-wel dwelleth, . and do me that to knowe."
"Do-wel and Do-bet, . and Do-best the thridde," quod he,
"Arn thre fair vertues, . and ben noght fer to fynde.
Who so is trewe of his tunge, . and of his two handes,
And thorugh his labour or thorugh his land, . his liflode wynneth,[50]
And is trusty of his tailende, . taketh but his owene,
And is noght dronklewe[51] ne dedeynous,[52] . Do-wel hym folweth.
Do-bet dooth ryght thus; . ac he dooth much more;
He is as lowe as a lomb, . and lovelich of speche,
And helpeth alle men . after that hem nedeth.
The bagges and the bigirdles, . he hath to-broke hem alle
That the Erl Avarous . heeld and hise heires.
And thus with Mammonaes moneie . he hath maad hym frendes,
And is ronne to religion, . and hath rendred the Bible,
And precheth to the peple . Seint Poules wordes:
_Libenter suffertis insipientes, cum sitis ipsi sapientes_:
'And suffreth the unwise' . with you for to libbe
And with glad will dooth hem good . and so God you hoteth.
Do-best is above bothe, . and bereth a bisshopes crosse,
Is hoked on that oon ende . to halie men fro helle;
A pik is on that potente,[53] . to putte a-down the wikked
That waiten any wikkednesse . Do-wel to tene.[54]
And Do-wel and Do-bet . amonges hem han ordeyned,
To crowne oon to be kyng . to rulen hem bothe;
That if Do-wel or Do-bet . dide ayein Do-best,
Thanne shal the kyng come . and casten hem in irens,
And but if Do-best bede[55] for hem, . thei to be there for evere.
Thus Do-wel and Do-bet, . and Do-best the thridde,
Crouned oon to the kyng . to kepen hem alle,
And to rule the reme . by hire thre wittes,
And noon oother wise, . but as thei thre assented."
I thonked Thoght tho, . that he me thus taughte.
"Ac yet savoreth me noght thi seying. . I coveit to lerne
How Do-wel, Do-bet, and Do-best . doon among the peple."
"But Wit konne wisse thee," quod Thoght, . "Where tho thre dwelle,
Ellis woot I noon that kan . that now is alyve."
Thoght and I thus . thre daies we yeden,[56]
Disputyng upon Do-wel . day after oother;
And er we were war, . with Wit gonne we mete.[57]
He was long and lene, . lik to noon other;
Was no pride on his apparaille . ne poverte neither;
Sad of his semblaunt, . and of softe chere,
I dorste meve no matere . to maken hym to jangle,
But as I bad Thoght thoo . be mene bitwene,
And pute forth som purpos . to preven his wittes,
What was Do-wel fro Do-bet, . and Do-best from hem bothe.
Thanne Thoght in that tyme . seide these wordes:
"Where Do-wel, Do-bet, . and Do-best ben in londe,
Here is Wil wolde wite, . if Wit koude teche him;
And whether he be man or woman . this man fayn wolde aspie,
And werchen[58] as thei thre wolde, . thus is his entente"

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