Note 44 — INTRODUCTION LIFE OF GOWER.

The features are quite different, it seems to me, from those represented in the Cotton and Glasgow MSS., and I think it more likely that the latter give us a true contemporary portrait. Gower certainly died in advanced age, yet the effigy on his tomb shows us a man in the flower of life. This then is either an ideal representation or must have been executed from rather distant memory, whereas the miniatures in the MSS., which closely resemble each other, were probably from life, and also preserve their original colouring. The miniatures in MSS. of the Confessio Amantis, which represent the Confession, show the penitent usually as a conventional young lover. The picture in the Fairfax MS. is too much damaged to give us much guidance, but it does not seem to be a portrait, in spite of the collar of SS added later. The miniature in MS. Bodley 902, however, represents an aged man, while that of the Cambridge MS. Mm. 2. 21 rather recalls the effigy on the tomb and may have been suggested by it.