virgin strength and beauty; second, the now decaying Romanz or Provençal poetry; and third, the doctrines of the Reformation, which were beginning, obscurely but irresistibly, to agitate the minds of men; a movement which took its origin, as do all great and permanent revolutions, in the lower depths of the popular heart, heaving gradually onwards, like the tremendous ground-swell of the equator, until it burst with resistless strength upon the Romish Church in Germany and in England, sweeping all before it. Wickliffe, who was born in 1324, only four years before Chaucer, had undoubtedly communicated to the poet many of his bold doctrines: the father of our poetry and the father of our reformed religion were both attached to the party of the celebrated John of Gaunt, and were both honoured with the friendship and protection of that powerful prince: Chaucer indeed was the kinsman of the Earl, having married the sister of Catherine Swinford, first the mistress and ultimately the wife of "time-honoured Lancaster;" and the poet's varied and uncertain career seems to have faithfully followed all the vicissitudes of John of Gaunt's eventful life.

Geoffrey Chaucer was born, as he informs us himself, in London; and for the date of an event so important to the destinies of English letters, we must fix it, on the authority of the inscription upon his tomb, as having happened in the year 1328; that is to say, at the commencement of the splendid and chivalrous reign of Edward III. The honour of having been the place of his education has been eagerly disputed by the two great and ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the former, however, of the two learned sisters having apparently the best established right to the maternity—or at least the fosterage of so illustrious a nurseling. Cambridge founds her claim upon the circumstance of Chaucer's having subscribed one of his early works "Philogenet of Cambridge, clerk." He afterwards returned to London, aud there became a student of the law. His detestation of the monks appears, from a very curious document, to have begun even so early as his abode in the grave walls of the Temple; for we find the name of Jeffrey Chaucer inscribed in an ancient registar as having been fined for the misdemeanour of beating a friar in Fleet Street.

The first efforts of a revival of letters will always be made in the path of translation; and to this principle Chaucer forms no exception. He was an indefatigable translator; and the whole of many— nay, a great part of all-his works bears unequivocal traces of the prevailing taste for imitation. How much he has improved upon his models, what new lights he has placed them in, with what skill he has infused fresh life into the dry bones of obscure authors, it will hereafter be our business to inquire. He was the poetical pupil of Gower, and, like Raphael and Shakspeare, he surpassed his master: Gower always speaks with respect of his illustrious pupil in the art

of poetry; and, in his work entitled 'Confessio Amantis' places in the mouth of Venus the following elegant compliment:

"And grete wel Chaucer, when ye mete,

As my disciple and my poéte:

For in the flowers of his youth,
In sundry wise, as he well couthe,
Of ditees and of songés glade

The which he for my saké made," &c.

These lines also prove that Chaucer began early to write; and probably our poet continued during the whole course of his eventful life, to labour assiduously in the fields of letters.

His earliest works were strongly tinctured with the manner, nay, even with the mannerism, of the age. They are much fuller of allegory than his later productions; they are distinguished by a greater parade of scholarship, and by a deeper tinge of that amorous and metaphysical mysticism which pervades the later Provençal poetry, and which reached its highest pitch of fantastical absurdity in the Arrêts d'Amour of Picardy and Languedoc. As an example of this we may cite his 'Dream,' an allegorical composition written to celebrate the nuptials of his friend and patron John of Gaunt, with Blanche, the heiress of Lancaster.

Chaucer was in every sense a man of the world: he was the ornament of two of the most brilliant courts in the annals of Englandthose of Edward III., and his successor Richard II. He also accompanied the former king in his expedition into France, and was taken prisoner about 1359, at the siege of Retters; and in 1367 we find him receiving from the Crown a grant of 20 marks, i. e. about 2007. of our present money.

Our poet, thus distinguished as a soldier, as a courtier, and as a scholar, was honoured with the duty of forming part of an embassy to the splendid court of Genoa, where he was present at the nuptials of Violante, daughter of Galeazzo Duke of Milan, with the Duke of Clarence. At this period he made the acquaintance of Petrarch, and probably of Boccaccio also: to the former of these illustrious men he certainly was personally known; for he hints, in his 'Canterbury Tales,' his having learned from him the beautiful and pathetic tale of the Patient Griselda :—

"Learned at Padua of a worthy clerke
Francis Petrarke, the laureate poét,

Highte thys clerke, whose rhethorique sweet
Enlumined al Itale of poesy.'

It was during his peregrinations in France and Italy that Chaucer drew at the fountain-head those deep draughts from the Hippocrene of Tuscany and of Provence which flow and sparkle in all his compositions. It is certain that he introduced into the English language an immense quantity of words absolutely and purely French, and

that he succeeded with an admirable dexterity in harmonizing the ruder sounds of his vernacular tongue; so successfully, indeed, that may be safely asserted that very few poets in any modern language are more exquisitely and uniformly musical than Chaucer. Indeed, he has been accused, and in rather severe terms, of having naturalized in English "a waggon-load of foreign words."

it

In 1380 we find Chaucer appointed to the office of Clerk of the Works at Windsor, where he was charged with overlooking the repairs about to made in St. George's Chapel, then in a ruinous

condition.

In 1383 Wickliffe completed his translation into the English language of the Bible, and his death, in the following year, seems to have been the signal for the commencement of a new and gloomy phase in the fortunes of the poet. Chaucer returned to England in 1386, and, the party to which he belonged having lost its political influence, he was imprisoned in the Tower, and deprived of the places and privileges which had been granted to him. Two years afterwards he was permitted to sell his patents, and in 1389 he appears to have been induced to abandon, and even to accuse, his former associates, of whose treachery towards him he bitterly complains.

In reward for this submission to the government, we afterwards find him restored to favour, and made, in the year 1389, Clerk of the Works at Westminster. It is at this period that he is supposed to have retired to pass the calm evening of his active life in the green shades of Woodstock, where he is related to have composed his admirable Canterbury Tales.' This production, though, according to many opinions, neither the finest nor even the most characteristic of Chaucer's numerous and splendid poems, is yet the one of them all by which he is now best known: it is the work which has handed his name down to future generations as the earliest glory of his country's literature; and as such it warrants us in appealing, from the perhaps partial judgments of isolated critics, to the sovereign tribunal of posterity. The decisions of contemporaries may be swayed by fashion and prejudice; the criticism of scholars may be tinged with partiality; but the unanimous voice of four hundred and fifty years is sure to be a true index of the relative value of a work of genius.

Beautiful as are many of his other productions, it is the 'Canterbury Tales' which have enshrined Chaucer in the penetralia of England's Glory Temple; it is to the wit, the pathos, the humanity, the chivalry of those Tales that our minds recur when our ear is struck with the venerable name of Chaucer. In 1390 we find the poet receiving the honourable charge of Clerk of the Works at Windsor; and, two years later, a grant from the Crown of 207. and a tun of wine annually. Towards the end of the century which his illustrious name had adorned, he appears to have fallen into some

distress; for another document is in existence securing to the poet the protection of the Crown (probably against importunate creditors); and in 1399 we find the poet's name inserted in the lease of a house holden from the Abbot and Chapter of Westminster, and occupying the spot upon which was afterwards erected Henry VII's Chapel, now forming one of the most brilliant ornaments of Westminster Abbey. In this house, as is with great probability conjectured, Chaucer died, on the 25th of October, 1400, and was buried in the Abbey, being the first of that long array of mighty poets whose bones repose with generations of kings, warriors, and statesmen beneath the "long-drawn aisles" of our national Walhalla.

In reading the works of this poet the qualities which cannot fail to strike us most are-admirable truth, freshness, and livingness of his descriptions of external nature; profound knowledge of human life in the delineation of character; and that all-embracing humanity of heart which makes him, as it makes the reader, sympathise with all God's creation, taking away from his humour every taste of bitterness and sarcasm. This humour, coloured by and springing from universal sympathy, this noblest humanity-we mean humanity in the sense of Terence's: "homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto"-is the heritage of only the greatest among mankind; and is but an example of that deep truth which Nature herself has taught us, when she placed in the human heart the spring of Laughter fast by the fountain of Tears.

We shall now proceed to examine the principal poems of Chaucer, in the hope of presenting to our readers some scale or measure of the gradual development of those powers which appear, at least to us, to have reached their highest apogee or exaltation in the 'Canterbury Tales.'

In the first work to which we shall turn our attention, Chaucer has given us a translation of a poem esteemed by all French critics the noblest monument of their poetical literature anterior to the time of Francis I. This is the Romaunt of the Rose,' a beautiful mixture of allegory and narrative, of which we shall presently give an outline in the words of Warton. The Roman de la Rose' was commenced by William de Lorris, who died in 1260, and completed, in 1310, by Jean de Meun, a witty and satirical versifier, who was one of the ornaments of the brilliant court of Charles le Bel. Chaucer has translated the whole of the portion composed by the former, together with some of Meun's continuation; making, as he goes on, innumerable improvements in the text, which, where it harmonizes with his own conceptions, he renders with singular fidelity. "The difficulties and dangers of a lover, in pursuing and obtaining the object of his desires, are the literal argument of the poem. This design is couched under the allegory of rose, which our lover, after frequent obstacles, gathers in a delicious garden. He traverses vast

ditches, scales lofty walls, and forces the gates of adamantine castles. These enchanted holds are all inhabited by various divinities; some of which assist, and some oppose, the lover's progress." The English poem is written, like the French original, in the short rhymed octosyllabic couplets so universally adopted by the Trouvères, a measure well fitted, from its ease and flowingness, for the purpose of long narratives. We have said that the translation is in most cases very close; Chaucer was so far from desiring to make his works pass for original when they had no claim to this qualification, that he even specifies, with great care and with even a kind of exultation, the sources from whence his productions are derived. Indeed, at such early periods in the literature of any country, writers seem to attach as great or greater dignity to the office of translator than to the more arduous duty of original composition; the reason of which probably is, that in the childhood of nations as well as of men learning is a rarer, and therefore more admired, quality than imagination.

The allegorical personages in the Romaunt of the Rose' are singularly varied, rich, and beautiful. Sorrow, Envy, Avarice, Hate, Beauty, Franchise, Richesse, are successively brought on the stage. As an example of the remarks we have just been making, we will quote a short passage from the latter part of Chaucer's translation, i. e. from that portion of the poem composed by John of Meun it describes the attendants in the palace of Old Age: we will print the original French beside the extract :

"Travaile et douleur la hébergent,
Mais ils la lient et la chargent,
Que Mort prochaine luy présentent,
En talant de se repentir;
Tant luy sont de fléaux sentir;
Adoncq luy vient en remembrance,
En cest tardifve présence,

Quand il se voit foible et chenue."

"With her, Labour and eke Travaile
Lodgid bene, with sorwe and wo.
That never out of her court go

Pain and Distress, Sekenesse and Ire,
And Melancholie that angry sire,
Ben of her palais Senatoures;
Goning and Grutching her herbegeors.
The day and night her to tourment,
With cruel death they her present,
And tellen her erliche and late,
That Deth standith armid at her gate."

Here Chaucer's improvements are plainly perceptible; the introduction of Death, standing armed at the gate, is a grand and sublime thought, of which no trace is to be found in the comparatively flat original; not to mention the terrible distinctness with which Chaucer enumerates Old Age's Senators, Pain, Distress, Sickness, Ire, and Melancholy; and her grim chamberlains, Groaning and Grudging.

The next poem which we shall mention is the love-story entitled 'Troilus and Cresseide,' founded on one of the most favourite legends of the Middle Ages, and which Shakspeare himself has dramatized in the tragedy of the same name. The anachronism of placing the scene of such a history of chivalric love in the heroic age of the Trojan War is, we think, more than compensated by the pathos, the nature, and the variety which characterize many of the ancient romances on this subject. Chaucer informs us that his au