GOWER, JOHN, one of the best of the English minor poets, was born probably in or about the year 1320; but the date is not exactly known. The place of his birth is equally uncertain. Weever makes him a native of Kent; in Caxton's edition of the Confessio Amantis he is mentioned as a Welshman. Popular tradition, however, has always pointed to Stitenham in Yorkshire as the place of the poet's birth; and the Rev. H. J. Todd, in his Illustrations of the Lives and Writings of Gower and Chaucer, publishes a deed from the charter-chest of the Duke of Sutherland (the present head of the family of which the poet was a scion), in which the signature of "Johannes Gower" stands first among those of the subscribing witnesses. On the back of this document is a note to the effect that the Gower is "Sir John Gower, the poet." The handwriting of the note is believed to be about a century posterior to that of the deed itself.
Possessing considerable means, Gower studied law, at that time a very expensive accomplishment, at the Inns of Court, and there contracted a friendship with Chaucer and Hoccleve. It is even said, though it has never been proved, that he attained the dignity of Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. It is known with certainty that he attached himself to Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, just as Chaucer had done to John of Gaunt. Like Chaucer also, he seems to have taken especial pleasure in railing at the weaknesses and vices of the churchmen of those times. It has been common among the recent biographers of Chaucer to maintain that a coolness sprung up between him and Gower in their old age. No direct proof of this has yet been brought forward. Tyrwhite suspects it from some expressions of Chaucer (which, however, might easily be explained away), and is confirmed in his suspicion by finding that Gower, in the second edition of his poems, omits some
eulogistic verses upon Chaucer, which had appeared in the first edition. Their friendship, however, was certainly still unbroken in the year 1393, for near the close of the Confessio Amantis, finished in that year, Gower puts the following compliment to Chaucer into the mouth of Venus:—
"And greet weel Chaucer when ye meet,
As my disciple and my poet;
For in the flowers of his youth,
In sundry wise, as he well couth,
Of ditties and of songs glade,
The which he for my sake made,
The land fulfilled is over all; &c."
The second edition of Gower's poems was published only a year before Chaucer's death; and if their author intended a slight upon his old friend, it is most probable that that friend died without knowing it. The attachment between them, so long as it lasted, seems to have been very sincere on both sides; for Gower, in the above quoted lines, was merely requiting a compliment that had been paid him some years before by his brother-poet, who, in dedicating to him his Troilus and Cressida, addressed him as "O moral Gower." This epithet, though not remarkably happy, has stuck to Gower, just as that of "judicious" is always associated with the name of Hooker. Of Gower's personal history little more is known, except that in his old age he became blind, and at his death, in 1402, was buried in the church of St Mary Overie, or, as it is now called, St Saviour's, in Southwark, where his monument is still to be seen. The beautiful church in which he lies was rebuilt in great part at his expense, and proves among other things that Gower must have been exempt from one of the usual misfortunes of poets—poverty.
Gower's poetical works are three in number—the Speculum Meditantis, a treatise on the duties of married life, written in French verse, and divided into ten books; Vox Clamantis, a narrative in Latin elegiacs, of the insurrection of the Commons in the reign of Richard II.; and the Confessio Amantis, of which a specimen has already been given. The first of these works is believed to have perished; manuscript copies of the second exist in the Cottonian and Bodleian libraries; the third had gone through four editions before the year 1560. The Confessio Amantis, or Lover's Confession, is a huge miscellaneous collection of physical, metaphysical, and moral reflections, and of stories culled from the common repertories of the middle age.
A kind of unity is given to these apparently incongruous materials by the form of the poem, which is a dialogue between a lover and his confessor, who is a priest of Venus, and is called Genius. In the moral part of his theme, Gower is confessedly wise, impressive, and sometimes almost sublime. But as Ellis, in his Specimens of the Early English Poets, observes, "His narrative is often quite petrifying; and when we read in his works the tales with which we have been familiarized in the poems of Ovid, we feel a mixture of surprise and despair at the perverse industry employed in removing every detail on which the imagination had been accustomed to fasten. The author of the Metamorphoses was a poet, and at least sufficiently fond of ornament. Gower considers him as a mere annalist, scrupulously preserves his facts, relates them with great perspicuity, and is fully satisfied when he has extracted from them as much morality as they can reasonably be expected to furnish." Though Gower's descriptions are often extremely agreeable, and his diction easy and smooth, the general tediousness of the narrative, and the prosaic feebleness of the conceptions, will prevent the Lover's Confession from ever rivaling or even approximating in popularity the works of the author of the Canterbury Tales. (Todd's Illustrations of the Lives and Writings of Gower and Chaucer; Ellis's Specimens of the Early English Poets; Craik's Hist. Lit.; Spalding's Hist. Eng. Lit.; Warton's
Hist. Eng. Poetry; Godwin's Life of Chaucer; Gower's Works, &c., &c.)
GOWER or GWYR, a peninsula of South Wales, projecting into the Bristol Channel, and forming the most western portion of Glamorganshire. It is 15 miles in length from N.E. to S.W., and has an average breadth of 5 miles. A colony of Flemings settled here in the time of Henry I., and their descendants still retain much of their national characteristics, and rarely intermarry with the Welsh.