long tonic, not syllabic, measure of the old English popular legend, which was itself a relic of the ancient Saxon metrical system. All these forms Chaucer handles with consummate ease and dexterity; indeed, it may be boldly affirmed that no English poet whatever is more exquisitely melodious than he: and the nature of the versification will often assist us in tracing the sources from whence Chaucer derived or adapted his materials. Of him it may be truly said, as Molière affirmed of himself, that "il prenait son bien où il le trouvait," for he appears in no single demonstrable instance to have taken the trouble to invent the intrigue or subject-matter of any of his stories, but to have freely borrowed them either for the multitudinous fabliaux of the Provençal poets, the legends of the medieval chroniclers, or the immense storehouse of the Gesta Romanorum, and the rich treasury of the early Italian writers, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

§ 9. The Tales themselves may be roughly divided into the two great classes of serious, tragic, or pathetic, and comic or humorous; in both styles Chaucer has seldom been equalled, and assuredly never surpassed. His wonderful power of object and character-painting, the incomparable conciseness and vividness of his descriptions, the loftiness of his senti ment, and the intensity of his pathos, can only be paralleled by the richness of his humor and the outrageously droll, yet perfectly natural extravagance of his laughable scenes. Both in the one style and in the other, the peculiar naiveté and sly infantine simplicity of his language add a charm of the subtlest kind, the reality of which is best proved by the evaporation of this delicate perfume in the process, so often and so unsuccessfully attempted, of modernizing his language. The finest of the elevated and pathetic stories are the Knight's Tale - the longest of them all, in which is related the adventure of Palamon and Arcite; the Squire's Tale, a wild half-Oriental story of love, chivalry, and enchantment, the action of which goes on "at Sarray (Bakhtchi-Sarai) in the lond of Tartary;" the Man of Law's Tale, the beautiful and pathetic story of Custance; the Prioress's Tale, the charming legend of "litel Hew of Lincoln," the Christian child murdered by the Jews for so perseveringly singing his hymn to the Virgin; and above all the Clerk of Oxford's Tale, perhaps the most beautiful pathetic narration in the whole range of literature. This, the story of Griselda, the model and heroine of wifely patience and obedience, is the crown and pearl of all the serious and pathetic narratives, as the Knight's Tale is the masterpiece among the descriptions of love and chivalric magnificence.

I will rapidly note the sources from which, as far as can be ascertained at present, Chaucer derived the subjects of the narratives above particularized. The Knight's Tale is freely borrowed from the Theseida of Boccaccio, many of the incidents of the latter being themselves taken from the Thebais of Statius. Though the action and personages of this noble story are assigned to classical antiquity, it is needless to say that the sentiments, manners, and feelings of the persons introduced are those of chivalric Europe; the "Two Noble Kinsmen," Palamon and Arcite, being the purest ideal types of the knightly character, and the

decision of their claims to the hand of Emilie by a combat in champ clos, an incident completely alien from the habits of the heroic age. The Squire's Tale bears evident marks of Oriental origin; but whether it be a legend directly derived from Eastern literature, or received by Chaucer after having filtered through a Romance version, is now uncertain. It is equal to the preceding story in splendor and variety of incident and word-painting, but far inferior in depth of pathos and ideal elevation of sentiment; yet it was by the Squire's Tale that Milton characterized Chaucer in that inimitable passage of the Penseroso where he evokes the recollections of the great poet:

norum.

"And call up him that left half-told

The story of Cambuscan bold,
Of Cambal, and of Algarsife,

And who had Canace to wife

That owned the virtuous ring and glass;

And of the wondrous horse of brass

On which the Tartar king did ride.”

The Man of Law's Tale is taken with little variation from Gower's voluminous poem “Confessio Amantis,” the incidents of Gower's narrative being in their turn traceable to a multitude of romances, as for instance those of Emare, the Chevalier au Cygne, the Roman de la Violette, Le Bone Florence de Rome, and the inexhaustible Gesta RomaThe character of the noble but unhappy Custance, beautiful as it is, is idealized almost beyond nature; and the employment of the Italian stanza harmonizes well with the tender but somewhat enervated graces of the narrative. The legend of the "litel clergion," foully murdered by the Jews at Lincoln, and whose martyrdom is so miraculously attested, was in all probability founded on fact, at least so far as regards cruel punishment having been inflicted on the Jews accused of such a crime. An infinity of ballads were current in England and Scotland on this subject, and one indeed has been preserved in Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, entitled "The Jewes Daughter." Moreover there still exists a record of the trial of some Jews for the assassination of a Christian child at Lincoln in 1256, in the reign of Henry III. Though Chaucer has retained the principal incidents of the English legend, he has laid the scene in Asia; but many allusions to the story of Hugh of Lincoln prove that the fundamental action is identically the same. The tale is exquisitely tender and graceful in sentiment, and exhibits precisely that union of religious sentimentality and refinement which makes it so appropriate in the mouth of Madame Eglantine the Prioress.

The pedigree of the most pathetic of Chaucer's stories, that of Patient Griselda, narrated by the clerk of Oxford, is traceable to Petrarch, who communicated the incidents to his friend Boccaccio. The latter has made them the groundwork of one of the novels of the Decameron, viz., the 10th and last of the Tenth Day; and there is evidence that the pathos of this beautiful story was found to transgress the limits of ordinary endurance. The submission of Griselda to the ordeals imposed

upon her conjugal and maternal feelings by the diabolical tyranny of the Marquis of Saluzzo, her husband, seems exaggerated beyond all the bounds of reality. Yet we should remember that the very intensity of Griselda's sufferings is intended to convey the highest expression of the inexhaustible goodness of the female heart.

The finest of Chaucer's comic and humorous stories are those of the Miller, the Reeve, the Sompnour, the Canon's Yeoman, and the Nun's Priest. Though all of these are excellent, the three best are the Miller's, the Reeve's, and the Sompnour's; and among these last it is difficult to give the palm of drollery, acute painting of human nature, and exquisite ingenuity of incident. It is much to be regretted that the comic stories turn upon events of a kind which the refinement of modern manners renders it impossible to analyze; but it should be remembered that society in Chaucer's day, though perhaps not less moral in reality, was far more outspoken and simple, and permitted and enjoyed allusions which have been proscribed by the more precise delicacy of later ages. The first of these irresistible drolleries is probably the adaptation to English life for the scene is laid at Oxford - of some old fabliau; the Reeve's Tale may be found in substance in the 6th novel of the Ninth Day of the Decameron: the Sompnour's Tale, though probably from a mediæval source, has not hitherto been traced. The admirable wit, humor, and learning, with which in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale Chaucer exposes the rascalities of the pretenders to alchemical knowledge, may have been derived from his own experience of the arts of these swindlers. The tale may be compared with Ben Jonson's comedy of the Alchemist. The tale assigned to the Nun's Priest is an exceedingly humorous apologue of the Cock and the Fox, in which, though the dramatis personæ are animals, they are endowed with such a droll similitude to the human character, that the reader enjoys at the same time the apparently incompatible pleasures of sympathizing with them as human beings, and laughing at their fantastic assumption of reason as lower creatures.

I have remarked, some pages back, on the circumstance of two of the stories being written in prose. It may be not uninteresting to investigate this exception. When Chaucer is applied to by the Host, he commences a rambling puerile romance of chivalry, entitled the Rhyme of Sir Thopas, which promises to be an interminable story of knighterrant adventures, combats with giants, dragons, and enchanters, and is written in the exact style and metre of the Trouvère narrative poems the only instance of this versification being employed in the Canterbury Tales. He goes on gallantly "in the style his books of chivalry had taught him,” and, like Don Quixote, "imitating, as near as he could, their very phrase;" but he is suddenly interrupted, with many expressions of comic disgust, by the merry host: —

-

"No mor of this, for Goddes dignite!'

Quod our Hoste, for thou makest me
So wery of thy verray lewednesse,
That, al so wisly God my soule blesse,

Myn eeres aken for thy drafty speche.
Now such a rym the devel I byteche !

This may wel be rym dogerel,' quod he."

There can be no doubt that the poet took this ingenious method of ridiculing and caricaturing the Romance poetry, which had at this time reached the lowest point of effeteness and commonplace. Chaucer then, with great good-nature and a readiness which marks the man of the world, offers to tell "a litel thing in prose; " and commences the long allegorical tale of Melibæus and his wife Patience, in which, though the matter is often tiresome enough, he shows himself as great a master of prose as of poetry. Indeed it would be difficult to find, anterior to Hooker, any English prose so vigorous, so harmonious, and so free from pedantry and affectation, as that of the great Father of our Literature:

"The morning-star of song, who made

His music heard below;

Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath

Preluded those melodious bursts, that fill

The spacious times of great Elizabeth

With sounds that echo still."

The other prose tale is narrated by the Parson, who, being represented as a somewhat simple and narrow-minded though pious and largehearted pastor, characteristically refuses to indulge the company with what can only minister to vain pleasure, and proposes something that may tend to edification, "moralité and vertuous matiere;" and commences a long and very curious sermon on the Seven Deadly Sins, their causes and remedies -a most interesting specimen of the theological literature of the day. It is divided and subdivided with all the painful minuteness of scholastic divinity; but it breathes throughout a noble spirit of evangelical piety, and in many passages attains great dignity of expression.

Besides these two Canterbury Taïes, Chaucer wrote in prose a translation of Boëthius' De Consolatione, and an imitation of that work, under the title of The Testament of Love, and an incomplete astrological work, On the Astrolabe, addressed to his son Lewis in 1391.

The general plan of the Canterbury Tales, a number of detached stories connected together by their being narrated by a troop of imaginary pilgrims, is similar to the method so frequently employed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and of which we find examples in the Decameron of Boccaccio, the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, and a multitude of similar collections of stories. The idea may have come originally from the East, the very inartificial plan of the Thousand and One Nights being not altogether dissimilar, in which the stories of the inexhaustible princess Dinarzadeh are inserted one within the other, like a set of Chinese boxes. Chaucer's plan, however, must be allowed to be infinitely superior to that of Boccaccio, whose ten accomplished young gentlemen and ladies assemble in their luxurious villa to escape from the terrible plague, the magnificent description of which forms the

Introduction, and which was then, in sad reality, devastating Florence. Boccaccio's interlocutors being all nearly of the same age and social condition, for they are little else but repetitions of the graceful types of Dioneo and Fiammetta, - it was impossible to make their tales correspond to their characters as Chaucer's do; independently of the shock to the reader's sense of propriety in finding these elegant voluptuaries whiling away, with stories generally of very doubtful morality, the hours of seclusion in which they find a cowardly and selfish asylum during a most frightful national calamity.

§ 10. Chaucer rendered to the language of his country a service in some respects analogous to that which Dante rendered to that of Italy. He harmonized, regulated, and made popular the still discordant elements of the national speech. The difficulty of reading and understanding him has been much exaggerated: the principal rule that the student should keep in mind is that the French words, so abundant in his writings, had not yet been so modified, by changes in their orthography and pronunciation, as to become anglicized, and are therefore to be read with their French accent; and secondly, that the final e which terminates so many English words was not yet become an e mute, and is to be pronounced as a separate syllable, as love, hope, lové, hopé ; and finally, the past termination of the verb ed is almost invariably to be made a separate syllable. Some curious traces of the old AngloSaxon grammar, as the inflections of the personal and possessive pronouns, are still retained; as well as of the Teutonic past participle, in the prefix i or y (ifalle, yron, German gefallen, geronnen), and a few other details of the Teutonic formation of the verb.

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

A. THE PREDECESSORS OF GOWER

AND CHAUCER.

By the middle of the fourteenth century the spirit of patriotism evoked by Edward III., and the influence of the continental Renaissance, were united to call forth a vigorous national literature. Its chief product, as in most similar cases, was poetry, but the earliest works in prose that can be properly called English belong to the same age. In A. D. 1356, Mandeville dedicated his Travels to Edward III. in 1362 Parliament was first opened by a speech in English; Chaucer had begun to write; and Gower had exchanged the French and Latin of his earlier works for his mother tongue. That meeting of different influences, referred to in the text, may be illustrated by the fact that the last great hero of chivalry, the Black Prince, and Occam (see p. 22, b), the last and greatest of the English schoolmen, lived in the same century with Chaucer, the father of English poetry, and Wicliffe, the herald of the Reformation. The new literature may be distinguished from that of the

two preceding centuries of transition (though it is difficult to draw the precise line of demarcation) by its substance as well as its form. While the language has become so like modern English, that it can be read with tolerable case, by pronouncing syllables which are now mute, allowing for the retention of some inflectional forms, especially in the pronouns and verbs, and taking the trouble to learn the meaning of a few words now obsolete, the subjects are no longer borrowed entirely from the monkish chroniclers or the Norman minstrels; and those so borrowed are treated with the independence of native genius. These characteristics are first fully seen in Chaucer, and in a less degree in Gower in proportion to his far less commanding genius; but these two had several precursors in England, while a vigorous native literature grew up in the Anglo-Saxon parts of Scotland. ADAM DAVIE and RICHARD ROLLE (d. 1349), or Richard of Hampole, near Doncaster, writers of metrical paraphrases of Scripture, and other religious pieces, belong properly to the Old English period, the former being the only English poet named in the