springing from the ground, rather than the fullblown flower. His muse is no "blabbling gossip of the air," fluent and redundant; but, like a stammerer, or a dumb person, that has just found the use of speech, crowds many things together with eager haste, with anxious pauses, and fond repetitions to prevent mistake. His words point as an index to the objects, like the eye or finger. There were none of the common-places of poetic diction in our author's time, no reflected lights of fancy, no borrowed roseate tints; he was obliged to inspect things for himself, to look narrowly, and almost to handle the object, las in the obscurity of morning we partly see and partly grope our way; so that his descriptions have a sort of tangible character belonging to them, and produce the effect of sculpture on the mind. Chaucer had an equal eye for truth of nature and discrimination of character; and his interest in what he saw gave new distinctness and force to his power of observation. The picturesque and the dramatic are in him closely blended together, and hardly distinguishable; for he principally describes external appearances as indicating character, as symbols of internal sentiment. There is a meaning in what he sees; and it is this which catches his eye by sympathy. Thus the costume and dress of the Canterbury Pilgrims-of the Knight -the Squire the Oxford Scholar-the Gaptoothed Wife of Bath, and the rest, speak for themselves. To take one or two of these at random: "There was also a nonne, a Prioresse, That of hire smiling was ful simple and coy; Hire gretest othe n'as but by seint Eloy : And Frenche she spake ful fayre and fetisly, And sikerly she was of great disport, But for to speken of hire conscience, Ful semely hire wimple ypinched was; Hire nose tretis; hire eyen grey as glas; Hire mouth ful smale; and therto soft and red; But sickerly she hadde a fayre forehed. It was almost a spanne brode, I trowe." "A Monk there was, a fayre for the maistrie, An out-rider, that loved venerie : A manly man, to ben an abbot able. Ful many a deinte hors hadde he in stable: The reule of Seint Maure and of Seint Beneit, He yave not of the text a pulled hen, Was all his lust, for no cost wolde he spare. With gris, and that the finest of the lond. His botes souple, his hors in gret estat, The Serjeant at Law is the same identical individual as Lawyer Dowling in Tom Jones, who wished to divide himself into a hundred pieces, to be in a hundred places at once. "No wher so besy a man as he ther n'as, The Frankelein, in "whose hous it snewed of mete and drinke;" the Shipman, "who rode upon a rouncie, as he couthe;" the Doctour of Phisike, "whose studie was but litel of the Bible;" the Wif of Bath, in "All whose parish ther was non, That to the offring before hire shulde gon, "whose parish -the poure Persone of a toun, was wide, and houses fer asonder;" the Miller, and the Reve, "a slendre colerike man," are all of the same stamp. They are every one samples E ✓ of a kind; abstract definitions of a species. Chaucer, it has been said, numbered the classes of men, as Linnæus numbered the plants. main to this day: others that Most of them re are obsolete, and may well be dispensed with, still live in his descriptions of them. Such is the Sompnoure: "A Sompnoure was ther with us in that place, And for to drinke strong win as rede as blood. And knew hir conseil, and was of hir rede. A bokeler hadde he made him of a cake. |