I seigh never a palmer Till now in this place." As clerk doth his bookes: Kenned me to his place, Both to sow and to set 4 The while I swink might. I have been his follower I dig and I delve, I do that Truth hoteth:' And sometime I thresh; In tailors craft and tinkers craft I weave and I wind And do what Truth hoteth." Contemporary with Petrarch in Italy, and, indeed, heralding the dawn of the intellectual day, was Geoffrey Chaucer (b. 1328, d. 1400), who is sometimes called the father of English Poetry, and who, if properly understood, will be found to be one of the most compact, nervous, wise, and musical of English poets. He was a courtier, learned, thoughtful, and good, and attended the courts of 2 Showed. 3 Securely. 4 Labour. 5 Sowed. 6 Tended. 7 Commandeth. Edward III. and Richard II., between the years 1360 and 1400. He was a man of very extensive knowledge, and determinately opposed to the priests, hating, with a fair, honest, open hatred, their ways, their hypocrisy, their domination, and avariciousness; and ready to herald, not the utter subversion of faith, but the Reformation, which after many years took place. Beyond all this, Chaucer is a painter of English character, equal to in generality, and surpassing in truth and finish, Mr. Dickens of our own day. He is quite as amusing, and just as fresh; to an immeasurably higher degree, a poet, -and it is certain that Dickens is a true poet; besides, he is free from the perpetual tendency to caricature, which that author possesses. In reading Chaucer, there comes as vividly before the mental eye as Mr. Wackford Squeers, and John Browdie, in "Nicholas Nickleby," or the exaggerated cockneys of "Pickwick," the honest, open-hearted, every-day Englishman of four hundred years ago. One can travel to Canterbury to perform a pilgrimage at the shrine of that cunning plotter-saint Thomas-à-Becket; one can pray with the good parson, jest with the man who sold pardons from Rome and did not believe in them, drink with the Abbot, laugh with the Abbess, and sing love-songs to the Nun. There they all are, with the Miller, the Sompnour, the Man of Law, and the whole of the company, as much alive as any of Dickens's or Anthony Trollope's characters now. Chaucer is therefore, viewed in this light, an historical poet; and he is as superior to the ordinary historian as a troop of soldiers is to a regiment of wax-works. One may possibly read Hume's history of Richard II., and fail to be impressed with it, although the historian has told it as well as any of his dry-as-dust brethren can; but to read of the Pilgrimage to Canterbury, the meeting at the Tabard Inn, the bustling host who gets up to wake the company, and from whom emanates the idea of telling tales to pass the time of the journey pleasantly, in which whosoever acquits himself well, to him are the others to contribute for a supper at their journey's end; to read of the trotting forth of the nags, the drunkenness of the "Coke,” the foppishness of the Squire, the purse-pride of the well-fed Abbot;--is to feel in the midst of a living creation. In the Miller's Tale we can shut our eyes and see the parish clerk with his smart shoes, his well-combed hair, and his scented breath and linen, making love to the carpenter's wife. Even the animals painted by Chaucer seem to live. The pictures of the horse bolting away to the fen where the wild mares are, of the fox lying in wait, and of the cock strutting and crowing, are just as accurately delineated as they could be by the closest observer of the present day; so vivid, so true, so real are they. All students of English literature will do well to supplement history with Chaucer. Moreover, he is unquestionably a first-class poet; and lastly, he is of rare service to the students of language, who, in his pages, perceive how our words have changed, both in meaning and spelling, as well as in weight and accent. Here are a few lines from one of his poems to exhibit some of the changes, which in this instance are given with the Anglo-Saxon characters. The passage is from the "Pardoneres Tale," where the three "riotours "—or fast young men, as we should now call them-meeting an old man, ask disdainfully Why lyvest bou, so longe, in so gret age? That wol chaungé his youpé for myn age; As longé tyme as it is Goddés wille. Here, beside the Saxon characters, we find a terminal. and accented é before consonants, and the genitive case of a noun, Goddes, now only marked by our modern sign of ', thus-God's.1 The following extract, taken from the "Marchaundes Tale," is a fair specimen of the poet's style, and would indicate that woman was not without her champions in Chaucer's time : A wyf is Goddes gifte verrayly; As landes, rentes, pasture, or comune, He which hath no wif I hold him schent; And herken why, I say not this for nought, O fleisch thay ben, and on blood as I gesse, A most admirable hand-book for the study of the English tongue at this period is "Specimens of Early English, A.D. 1250-1400," with grammatical introduction, notes, and a glossary, edited by Mr. R. Morris, and issued by the Clarendon Press, Oxford. 2 Yielding, obedient. |