appeal throughout, an unconscious installation of Scripture alone, as the ultimate judge; the test of everything is a moral and purely religious one, its agreement with holiness and charity.

English prose in Wycliffe's Bible, the higher English poetry in its true father, Chaucer, maintained this prevailing and dominant Teutonism. Wycliffe's Bible, as translated from the Vulgate, had not so entirely shaken off the trammels of Latinity as our later versions; but this first bold assertion of Teutonic independence im measurably strengthened, even in its language, that independence. It tasked the language, as it were, to its utmost vigour, copiousness, and flexibility: and by thus putting it to the trial, forced out all those latent and undeveloped qualities. It was constantly striving to be English, and by striving became so more and more. Compare the freedom and versatility of Wycliffe's Bible with Wycliffe's Tracts. Wycliffe has not only advanced in the knowledge of purer and more free religion, he is becoming a master of purer and more free English.

Geoffrey Chaucer, among the most remarkable of poets, was in nothing more remarkable than in being most emphatically an English poet. Chaucer lived in courts and castles: he was in the service of the King, he was a retainer of the great Duke of Lancaster. the court and in the castle, no doubt, if anywhere, with the Norman chivalrous magnificence lingered whatever

In

the opportunity of observing that the famous prophecy, ascribed to Langland, about the King who should suppress the monasteries, is merely a vague and general prediction; though the naming the Abbot of Abingdon is a lucky coincidence.-See Wright, p. 192.

remained of Norman manners and language. Chaucer had served in the armies of King Edward III.; he had seen almost all the more flourishing countries, many of the great cities, of the Continent, of Flanders, France, Italy. It may be but a romantic tradition, that at the wedding of Violante to the great Duke of Milan he had seen Petrarch, perhaps Boccaccio, and that Froissart too was present at that splendid festival. It may be but a groundless inference from a misinterpreted passage in his poems, that he had conversed with Petrarch (November, 1372); but there is unquestionable evidence that Chaucer was at Genoa under a commission from the Crown. He visited brilliant Florence, perhaps others of the noble cities of Italy. Five years later he was in Flanders and at Paris. In 1378 he went with the Embassy to demand the hand of a French Princess for the young Richard of Bordeaux. Still later he was at the gorgeous court of the Visconti at Milan." Chaucer was master of the whole range of vernacular poetry, which was bursting forth in such young and prodigal vigour, in the languages born from the Romance Latin. He had read Dante, he had read Petrarch; to Boccaccio he owed the groundwork of two of his best poems-the Knight's Tale of Palamon and Arcite, and Griselidis. I cannot but think that he was familiar with the Troubadour poetry of the Langue d'Oc; of the Langue d'Oil, he knew well the knightly tales of the Trouvères and the Fabliaux, as well as the later allegorical school, which was then in the height of its fashion in Paris. He translated the Romance of the Rose.

It is indeed extraordinary to see the whole of the mediæval, or post-medieval poetry (with the great ex

Compare the lives of Chaucer, especially the latest by Sir Harris Nicolas.

ception of the Dantesque vision of the other world) summed up, and as it were represented by Chaucer in one or more perfect examples, and so offered to the English people. There is the legend of martyrdom in Constance of Surrie; the miracle legend, not without its harsh alloy of hatred to the unbeliever, in Hugh of Lincoln; the wild, strange, stirring adventures told in the free prolix Epopee of the Trouvère, in its romanticised classic form, in Troilus and Cressida; in the wilder Oriental strain of magic and glamour in the half-told tale of Cambuscan; the chivalrous in Palamon and Arcite; to which perhaps may be added the noble Franklin's Tale. There is the Fabliau in its best, in its tender and graceful form, in Griselidis; in its gayer and more licentious, in January and May; in its coarser, more broadly humorous, and, to our finer manners, repulsive, Miller's Tale; and in that of the Reve. The unfinished Sir Thopas might seem as if the spirit of Ariosto or Cervantes, or of lighter or later poets, was struggling for precocious being. There is the genial apologue of the Cock and the Fox, which might seem an episode from the universal brute Epic, the Latin, or Flemish, or German or French Reynard. The more cumbrous and sustained French allegory appears in the translation of the Romaunt of the Rose; the more rich and simple in the Temple of Fame. There are a few slighter pieces which may call to mind the Lais and Serventes of the South.

Yet all the while Chaucer in thought, in character, in language, is English-resolutely, determinately, almost boastfully English." The creation of native poetry was

There is a curious passage in the Prologue to the Testament of Love on soveran wits in Latin and in French.

"Let then Clerkes enditen in Latin, for they have the propertie of science, and the knowledge in that facultie:

his deliberate aim; and already that broad, practical, humorous yet serious view of life, of life in its infinite variety, that which reaches its height in Shakspeare, has begun to reveal itself in Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales, even in the Preface, represent, as in a moving comedy, the whole social state of the times; they display human character in action as in speech; and that character is the man himself, the whole man, with all his mingling, shifting, crossing, contradictory passions, motives, peculiarities, his greatnesses and weaknesses, his virtues and his vanities; every one is perfectly human, yet every one the individual man, with the very dress, gesture, look, speech, tone of the individual. There is an example of every order and class of society, high, low, secular, religious. As yet each is distinct in his class, as his class from others. Contrast Chaucer's pilgrims with the youths and damsels of Boccaccio. Exquisitely as these are drawn, and in some respects finely touched, they are all of one gay light class; almost any one might tell any tale with equal propriety; they differ in name, in nothing else.

In his religious characters, if not in his religious tales (religion is still man's dominant motive), Chaucer is by no means the least happy. In that which is purely religious the poet himself is profoundly religious; in his Prayer to the Virgin, written for the Duchess Blanche of Lancaster, for whom also he poured forth his sad elegy; in his Gentle Martyrs S. Constantia and S. Cecilia: he is not without his touch of bigotry, as has been said, in Hugh of Lincoln. But the strong Teutonic good sense of Chaucer had looked more deeply into the

and let Frenchmen in their French also enditen their quaint termes, for it is kindely to their mouthes; and let us

shew our fantasies in such wordes as wee learneden of our dames tongue."Fol. 271.

whole monastic and sacerdotal system. His wisdom betrays itself in his most mirthful, as in his coarsest humour. He who drew the Monk, the Pardoner, the Friar Limitour, the Summoner, had seen far more than the outer form, the worldliness of the Churchman, the abuse of indulgences, the extortions of the friars, the licentiousness of the Ecclesiastical Courts, of the Ecclesiastics themselves: he had penetrated into the inner depths of the religion. Yet his wisdom, even in his most biting passages, is tempered with charity. Though every order, the Abbot, the Prioress, the Friar, the Pardoner, the Summoner, are impersonated to the life, with all their weaknesses, follies, affectations, even vices and falsehoods, in unsparing freedom, in fearless truth, yet none, or hardly one, is absolutely odious; the jolly hunting Abbot, with his dainty horses, their bridles jingling in the wind, his greyhounds, his bald shining head, his portly person, his hood fastened with a rich pin in a love-knot: the tender and delicate Prioress, with what we should now call her sentimentality, virtuous no doubt, but with her broad and somewhat suspicious motto about all-conquering love: the Friar, who so sweetly heard confession, and gave such pleasant absolution, urging men, instead of weeping and prayers, to give silver to the friars; with his lisping voice and twinkling eyes, yet the best beggar in his house, to whom the poorest widow could not deny a farthing: the Pardoner with his wallet in his lap, brimful of pardons from Rome, with his reliques or pillowbere covered with part of our Lady's veil and the glass vessel with pig's bones; yet in Church the Pardoner was a noble Ecclesiast, read well, chanted with such moving tones, that no one could resist him and not throw silver into the offertory. The Summoner, whose office and the