Peter, the ploughboy, intended as a representative of the common people,
drops asleep on Malvern Hills, between Wales and England, and sees in his
dream an array of virtues and vices pass before him--such as Mercy, Truth,
Religion, Covetousness, Avarice, etc. The allegory is not unlike that of
Bunyan. By using these as the personages, in the manner of the early
dramas called the Moralities, he is enabled to attack and severely scourge
the evil lives and practices of the clergy, and the abuses which had
sprung up in the Church, and to foretell the punishment, which afterward
fell upon the monasteries in the time of Henry VIII., one hundred and
fifty years later:
And then shall the Abbot of Abingdon, and all his issue forever,
_Have a knock of a king, and incurable the wound_.
His attack is not against the Church itself, but against the clergy. It
is to be remarked, in studying history through the medium of literature,
that the works of a certain period, themselves the result of history,
often illustrate the coming age, by being prophetic, or rather, as
antecedents by suggesting consequents.
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