sent themselves as they might, and when they hit upon order, it was ignoantly and involuntarily. Here for the first time appears a superiority of intellect, which at the instant of conception suddenly halts, rises above itself passes judgment, and says to itsel This phrase tells the same thing as the last-remove it; these WO ideas are disjointed-connect hem; this description is feeble-reconsider it." When a man can speak thus he has an idea, not learned in the schools, but personal and practical, of the human mind, its process and needs, and of things also, their composition and combinations; he has a style, that is, he is capable of making every thing anderstood and seen by the human mind. He can extract from every object, landscape, situation, character, the special and significant marks, so as to group and arrange them, in order to compose an artificial work which surpasses the natural work in its purity and completeness. He is capable, as Chaucer was, of seeking out in the old common forest of the middle ages, stories and legends, to replant them in his own soil, and make them send out new shoots. He has the right and the power, as Chaucer had, of copying and translating, because by dint of retouching he impresses on his translations and copies his original mark; he recreates what he imitates, because through or by the side of worn-out fancies and monotonous stories, he can display, as Chaucer did, the charming ideas of an amiable and elastic mind, the thirty master-forms of the fourteenth century, the splendid freshness of the verdurous landscape and springtime of England. He is not far from conceiving an idea of truth and fe. He is on the brink of independent thought and fertile discovery. This was Chaucer's position. At the dis tance of a century and a half, he has affinity with the poets of Elizabeth * by his gallery of pictures, and with the

reformers of the sixteenth century by his portrait of the good parson.

Affinity merely. He advanced a few steps beyond the threshold of h.s art, but he paused at the end of the vestibule. / He half opens the great door of the temple, but does not take his seat there; at most, he sat down in it only at intervals. / In Arcive and Palamon, in Troilus and Cressida, be sketches sentiments, but does not create characters; he easily and naturally traces the winding course of events and conversations, but does not mark the precise outline of a striking figure. If occasionally, as in the description of the temple of Mars, after the Thebaid of Statius, feeling at his back the glowing breeze of poetry, he draws out his feet, clogged with the mud of the mid dle age, and at a bound stands upon the poetic plain on which Statius imitated Virgil and equalled Lucan, he, at other times, again falls back into the childish gossip of the trouvères, or the dull gabble of learned clerks—to "Dan Phebus or Apollo-Delphicus." Else. where, a commonplace remark on art intrudes in the midst of an impassioned description. He uses three thousand verses to conduct Troilus to his first interview. / He is like a precocious and poetical child, who mingles in his lovedreams quotations from his grammar and recollections of his alphabet.* / Even in the Canterbury Tales he repeats

himself, unfolds artless developments, Sack

forgets to concentrate his passion or his idea. He begins a jest, and scarcely ends it. He dilutes a bright coloring in a monotonous stanza. His voice is like that of a boy breaking into man hood. At first a manly and firm accent is maintained, then a shrill sweet sound shows that his growth is nou finished. and that his strength is subject to weakness. Chaucer sets out as if to quit the middle age; but in the end he is there still. / To-day he composes the Canterbury Tales; yesterday he was translating the Roman de la Rose. To-day

of in lên sảy andy con pacme.

he is studying the complicated machinery of the heart, discovering the issues of primitive education or of the ruling disposition, and creating the comedy of manners; to-morrow, he will have no pleasure but in curious events, smooth allegories, amorous discussions, imitated from the French, or learned moralities from the ancients. X Alternately he is an observer and a trouvère; instead of the step he ought to have advanced, he has but made a halfstep. Who has prevented him, and the others who surround him? We meet with the obstacle in the tales he has translated of Melibeus, of the Parson, in his Testament of Love; in short, so long as he writes verse, he is at his ease; as soon as he takes to prose, a sort of chain winds around his feet and stops him. His imagination is free, and his reasoning a slave. The rigid scholastic divisions, the mechanical manner of arguing and replying, the ergo, the Latin quotations, the authority of Aristotle and the Fathers, come and weigh down his budding thought. His native invention disap pears under the discipline imposed. The servitude is so heavy, that even in the work of one of his contemporaries, the Testament of Love, which, for a long time, was believed to be written by Chaucer, amid the most touching plaints and the most smarting pains, the beautiful ideal lady, the heavenly mediator who appears in a vision, Love, sets her theses, establishes that the cause of a cause is the cause of the thing caused, and reasons as pedantically as they would at Oxford. In Lonh me what can talent, even feeling, end, nath when it is kept down by such shackles? What succession of original mam truths and new doctrines could be found and proved, when in moral

moder and

into a reflective mood, straightway Saint Thomas, Peter Lombard, the manual of sins, the treatise on define tion and syllogism, the army of the ancients and of the Fathers, descend from their glory, enter his brain, speak in his stead; and the trouvère's pleasant voice becomes the dogmatic and sleep-inspiring voice of a doctor. In love and satire he has experience, and he invents; in what regards morality and philosophy he has learning, and copies. For an instant, by a solitary leap, he entered upon the close obser. vation and the genuine study of man; he could not keep his ground, he did not take his seat, he took a poetic ex cursion; and no one followed him. The level of the century is lower; he is on it himself for the most part. He is in the company of narrators like Froissart, of elegant speakers like Charles of Orléans, of gossipy and barren verse-writers like Gower, Lydgate, and Occlever There is no fruit, but frail and fleeting blossom, many useless branches, still more dying or dead branches; such is this literature. And why? Because it had no longer a root? after three centuries of effort, a heavy instrument cut it underground. This instrument was the Scholastic Philos ophy. L

VI.

Beneath every literature there is a philosophy. Beneath every work of art is an idea of nature and of life; this idea leads the poet. Whether the au thor knows it or not, he writes in order to exhibit it; and the characters which he fashions, like the events which he arranges, only serve to bring to light the dim creative conception which raises and combines them. Under lying Homer appears the noble Lfe of

heroic paganism and of happy Greece. Underlying Dante, the sad and violent life of fanatical Catholicism and of the much-hating Italians. From either we might draw a theory of man and of the beautiful. It is so with others; and this is how, according to the variations, the birth, blossom, decline, or slug gishness of the master-idea, literature varies, is born, flourishes, degenerates, comes to an end. Whoever plants the one, plants the other whoever under

Must we quote all these good people who speak without having any thing to say? You may find them in Warton; * dozens of translators, importing the poverties of French literature, and imitating imitations; rhyming chroniclers, most commonplace of men, whom we only read because we must accept history from every quarter, even from imbeciles; spinners and spinsters of didactic poems, who pile up verses on the training of falcons, on heraldry, on chemistry; editors of moralities, who invent the same dream over again for the hundredth time, and get themselves taught universal history by the goddess Sapience. Like the writers of the Latin decadence, these folk only think of copying, compiling, abridging, constructing in textbooks, in rhymed memoranda, the encyclopedia of their times.

Lis.en to the most illustrious, the grave Gower-" morall Gower," as he was called! + Doubtless here and there he contains a remnant of brilliancy and grace. He is like an old secretary of a Court of Love, André le Chapelain or any other, who would pass the day in solemnly registering the sentences of ladies, and in the evening, partly asleep on his desk, would see in a halfdream their sweet smile and their beautiful eyes. The ingenious but exhausted vein of Charles of Orléans still flows in his French ballads. He has the same fondling delicacy, almost a little affected. The poor little poetic spring flows yet in thin transparent streamlets over the smooth pebbles, and murmurs with a babble, pretty, but so low that at times you cannot near it. But dull is the rest! His great poem, Confessio Amantis, is a dialogue between a lover and his confessor, imitated chiefly from Jean de Meung, having for object, like the Roman de la Rose, to explain and classify the impediments of love. The superannuated theme is always

politics, a litany f ancient and modern legends gleaned from the compilers, marred in the passage by the pedantry of the schools and the ignorance of the age. It is a cart-load of scholastic rubbish; the sewer tumbles upon this feeble spirit, which of itself was flowing clearly, but now, obstructed by tiles, bricks, plaster, ruins from all quarters of the globe, drags on darkened and sluggish. Gower, one of the most learned of his time, supposed that Latin was invented by the old prophetess Carmentis; that the grammarians, Aristarchus, Donatus, and Didymus, regulated its syntax, pronunciation, and prosody; that it was adorned by Cicero with the flowers of eloquence and rhetoric; then enriched by translations from the Arabic, Chaldæan, and Greek; and that at last, after much labor of celebrated writers, it attained its final perfection in Ovid, the poet of love. Elsewhere he discovers that Ulysses learned rhetoric from Cicero, magic from Zoroaster, astronomy from Ptol. emy, and philosophy from Plato. And what a style! so long, so dull, so drawn out by repetitions, the mos minute details, garnished with references to his text, like a man who, with his eyes glued to his Aristotle and his Ovid, a slave of his musty parchments, can do nothing but copy and string his rhymes together. Schoolboys even ir old age, they seem to believe that every truth, all wit, is in their great woodbound books; that they have no need to find out and invent for themselves; that their whole business is to repeat; that this is, in fact, man's business. The scholastic system had enthroned the dead letter, and peopled the worid with dead understandings.

After Gower come Occleve and Lydgate. "My father Chaucer would willingly have taught me," says Oc cleve, "but I was dull, and learned little or nothing." He paraphrased in verse a treatise of Egidius, on govern

tion. You will find here an exposition of hermetic science, lectures on the philosophy of Aristotle, a treatise on

• History of English Poetry, vol. ii. ↑ Contemporary with Chaucer. The Confessio Amantis dates from 1393.

History of Rosiphele. Ballads.

others, on compassion, after Augus tine, and on the art of dying; then love tales; a letter from Cupid, dated