he freely translated his two longest, and, in a sense, two greatest poems, Troilus and Creseide and the Knight's Tale. But while his riper genius is guided by the poets of Italy, he is still influenced by those of France,- the troubadours and trouvères. The comic stories in the Canterbury Tales are mostly based on the fabliaux. His indirect debt to the Italian stars, however, in all that concerns the elegant handling of material, and in the fusion of the romantic with the classic spirit, is more important. It is in the immortal group of pilgrims that he breaks away from the literary traditions and restricted tastes of ranks and classes, and becomes characteristically English, distinctly national. Even here extraneous influences may be detected, but original genius gives itself freely to the native force of its theme, and we have, for the most part, the pleasing conditions of daily life. The predominant influence, therefore, till 1372, is French; thence till 1384, Italian; from 1384 till 1400, English. This poetic development may be represented by the correspondent table of works: Romaunt of the Rose, Complaint to Pity, Book of the Duchess,

First period...

The Dream,

The Court of Love,

The Flower and the Leaf,

The Former Age,

The Assembly of Fowls,

The House of Fame,

Troilus and Creseide,

Knight's Tale.

Legend of Good Women,

(attributed).'

Canterbury Tales (the majority),
Astrolabie (prose),

Testament of Love (attributed),
Various Ballads.

Style.-Refined, precise, perspicuous, employing figures less for ornament than lucidity; flexible and graceful, varying in subtle response to the subject and the mood; the living voice, as

1 The genuineness of many works which till recently have passed as Chancer's, has been questioned by the most advanced school of criticism. The dust of the controversy has not yet settled.

it were, of nature, carrying a tone as original and divine as the music of her purling brooks; sometimes tedious from too great minuteness, as in other writers from too frequent digression; if somewhat artificial and disjointed in the earlier workmanship, simple and well-ordered in the later. Do but consider, for instance, the linked sweetness' of the love-passages in Troilus, or the grand harmony of his tragic description, as of the temple. of Mars,

First on the wal was peynted a forest,

In which ther dwelleth neither man ne best,
With knotty knarry bareyne trees olde

Of stubbes scharpe and hidous to byholde

In which ther ran a swymbel in a swough.'

Or the divine liquidness of diction and fluidity of movement in this stanza of the child-martyr:

'My throte is cut unto my nekke-bone,

Saide this child, and as by way of kinde
I shoulde have deyd, yea, longe time agone;
But Jesu Christ, as ye in bookes finde,
Will that is glory last and be in minde,
And for the worship of His mother dere
Yet may I sing 0 Alma loud and clere.'

Compare Wordsworth's modernization of the first three lines:

'My throat is cut unto the bone, I trow,

Said this young child, and by the law of kind

I should have died, yea, many hours ago.'

The flower must fade, though gathered by the most skilful hand, when severed from its root that lies imbedded in the soil.

Rank. First modeller of the heroic couplet, first of the modern versifiers, whose melody and ease few, if any, have surpassed; whose variety and power of diction not ten of his successors have been able to rival; to Occleve, his pupil,—

"The firste fynder of our faire langage.'

The first artist of expression, that is, the first to command or guide his impressions, to deliberate, sift, test, reject, and alter. Inventive, though a disciple; original, though a translator; and— like Shakespeare—a borrower, but lending to all that he borrows the gentle luxuriance of his own fancy, extracting from the old. romances their sublime extravagances without their frivolous descriptions, re-creating the rude materials of the trouvères into

forms of elegance, retaining the gayety and critical coolness of the French without its wearisome idleness, and tempering the joyous carelessness of the Italian with the English seriousness.

Our first painter of Nature, who, haunting her solitudes, caught the glow of her skies and earth in his landscape. Without the gift to see the hidden wealth of meaning in the springing herbage, dew-drops, and rivulets glad, in the sighings among the reeds and the silent openings of the flowers, no great poet is possible. Chaucer has it conspicuously. His grass, soft as velvet, which he is never done praising, is 'so small, so thick, so fresh of hue!' The colors of petal and leaf, 'white, blue, yellow, and red,' he counts. The note of every song-bird he knows and loves. His scenery has the freshness of a perennial spring. Across five centuries its leaves are green, and its breezes fan our cheeks. The May-time is his favorite season. Before Burns or Wordsworth, he has loved and sung the daisy, the eye-of-day, and how tenderly!

Then in my bed there daweth me no day
That I n'am up and walking in the mead,
To see this flower against the sunne spread,
When it upriseth early in the morrow;

That blissful sight softeneth all my sorrow.'

With the simple, pure delight of a child, he kneels to greet it when it first unfolds:

And down on knees anon right I me set,
And as I could this freshe flow'r I grette,
Kneeling always till it unclosed was

Upon the small, and soft, and sweete gras.'

The first clear-eyed and catholic observer of man, who, catching the living manners as they rise, fixes them in pictures that show the life of a hundred years as vivid and familiar as the figures in the streets of our cities. Think of the portraits of the knight, the squire, the prioress, the wife, the clerk, the parson, the monk,

And, for to fasten his hood under his chin,
He had of gold ywrought a curious pin;
A love-knot in the greater end there was:
His head was bald, and shone as any glass,
And eke his face, as it had been anoint;
He was a lord full fat and in good point:
His eyen steep, and rolling in his head,
That steamed as a furnace of a lead.'

In all this world ne was there none him like
To speak of physic and of surgery,
For he was grounded in astronomy.
He kept his patient a full great deal
In houres by his magic naturel:
Well could he fortunen the ascendant
Of his images for his patient. .
Of his diet measurable was he,

For it was of no superfluity,

But of great nourishing, and digestible.
His study was but little on the Bible.
For gold in physic is a cordial,
Therefore he loved gold in special.'

[custom

[make fortunate

all are here,

Face, costume, disposition, habits, antecedents, each character distinct and to this day typical; each maintained, moreover, by its subsequent actions; each speech appropriate to the speaker, and all strung together by incidents so natural, by conversations so life-like,-a veritable troop of pilgrims filing leisurely on, talking and trying to amuse themselves by what they have heard in the hall or by the wayside! This is dramatic composition, not in its full and precise form, but in its rudiments. The pictorial power of dealing in a living way with men and their actions is Chaucer's point of contact with Shakespeare:

Like all who excel in the delineation of character, a master of humor and pathos. To take an additional example; the pardoner, describing himself preaching, says:

"Then pain I me to stretchen forth my neck,
And east and west upon the people I beck,

As doth a dove sitting upon a barn.'

Or, to view the full length of a monk in one line,—

'Fat as a whale, and walked as a swan.'

As with Shakespeare, again, it is difficult to decide in which style Chaucer is greater,-the humorous or the pathetic. When Griselda is informed by her husband that she must return to her father to make room for her successor, she says:

'I never held me lady ne maistress,

But humble servant to your worthiness,

And ever shall, while that my life may dure,

Aboven every worldly creature. . . .

And of your newe wife God of his grace
So grant you weal and prosperity;
For I wol gladly yielden her my place,
In which that I was blissful wont to be:
For, sith it liketh you my lord quod she,
That whilome weren all my heartes rest,
That I shall gon, I wol go where you list. . . .