was his wastefulness,* Longland exclaims, that brought Richard to his ruin. The passion for fine dress was the natural folly of a nation just rising from barbarism; and Chaucer seems to have purposely arrayed his Canterbury travellers in more modest attire. The grave simplicity of the Knight, the plainness of the Clerke and Parson, are a rebuke to the barbaric wastefulness of the royal circle.

Chaucer's Truthfulness.-We are familiar with the men and women of the age of Richard as we are with those of no other period of English history. Even Shakspeare has failed to paint as clearly his Elizabethan contemporaries; Johnson and Boswell give no plain insight into the homes of London in George III.'s time; Dickens and Thackeray have left exaggerated pictures of their own. But the genius of Chaucer has carried us back into the daily life of his distant age as vividly as if we had mixed with his familiar associates along the street of Chepe. We feel sure that in his picture there is no

* Says Longland (Deposition of King Richard):

For when was evere ony Cristen king that ye ever knew

That held surche an household be the half dell, etc.

CHAUCER'S TRUTH.

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exaggeration, and that every line is true; that he has repeated only what he saw around him, and has avoided the arts by which painters of character are usually eager to enlarge their portraits. It would be well if novelists and poets would study in his school, would revive, if possible, the delicate graces of his refined and careful drawing. Of his twenty-nine pilgrims, each represents some noted class of his contemporaries, yet each is a distinct and living individual, wholly separate from his class; Chaucer possesses this rare power, which was Homer's chief charm, of drawing the lines of human character with a close adherence to nature. No one doubts that the dainty Prioress was a model of nicety; that the Franklin lived on some fertile farm, fed on strong ale; that the gentle Hoste was stalwart and rosy; that the Friar and the Limitour wrangled together; or that the modest Clerke told well his story of Griselda. Truth, boldness, delicate perception, unvarying care and labor, are the sources of Chaucer's wonderful

success.

Order of Chaucer's Poems.—Chaucer's poems are usually arranged in three periods— the French, Italian, English. He was young when he wrote the A B C rules of love for

the Duchess Blanche; the poem on her death was written about 1369. From 1372 to 1378 he was employed on various embassies, and was three times in Italy; his verses assume a classic and foreign form, and gain in elegance. He wrote incessantly, and showed the almost limitless profusion of his fancy. To this period belong Troilus and Creseide, a memorable and touching tale of woman's inconstancy; the Parliament of Foules; Annelida and Arcite; The House of Fame, the finest of his imaginative pieces. From 1384 to 1390, or rather 1400, he becomes chiefly an English poet, painting the busy world around him in the Canterbury Tales, and classic scenes in the Legend of Good Women. It is supposed that he finished the Parson's Tale, a lay sermon, in 1400, and died the same year in his house at Westminster.

Chaucer and Addison.-In his wit and delicate humor, Chaucer resembles Addison. Both combine some of the higher elements of the Anglo-Saxon disposition; are mild, cheerful, graceful, composed; are never hurried into passion, or rise into epic grandeur. Chaucer's wit is far more effective than that of his successor; often coarser, but sometimes of a finer strain than anything Addison has written. Both are gentle satirists,

CHAUCER'S HUMOR.

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who amuse even their victims, and seem never desirous to inflict a wound.

One of Chaucer's most delicate pieces of humor is the opening of the Wife of Bath's Tale, in which he accounts for the flight of the elves and faeries by the sudden increase of limitoures and "holy freres." He chants with gentle malice:

In olde dayes of the king Artour,

Of which that Bretons speken gret honour,
All was this lond fulfilled of faerie.

The Elf-quene, with hire joly compagnie,
Danced ful oft in many a grene mede.
This was the old opinion, as I rede;
I speke of many hundred yeres ago;
But now can no man see non elves mo,
For now the grete charitee and prayeres
Of limitoures and other holy freres,

That serchen every land and every streme,
As thikke as motes in the sonne-beme, etc.

The limitour was a friar licensed to beg within a certain district. The poet was never weary of shooting his delicate arrows at this class of mendicants, and has anticipated Erasmus and Sir Thomas More in his scorn of indolence.

Chaucer's Ideas.-It seems scarcely five hundred years ago when we find in Chaucer the plain sense, the clear intelligence, of the Saxon family, the republican instincts that

already rule in all civilized races, the principles of progress that even yet are only slowly making their way among men, and might still be effectually served by a careful study of the poet of the days of Richard II. To the young king he cries, “Drede God, do law, love truth and worthinesse." At the arrogance of the feudal class he is never weary of aiming gentle satire. He sings:

He is not gentile, though he rich seeme,

All [though] weare he miter, croune, or diademe.

Or, in the Wife of Bath's Tale, in a coarser

vein:

Swiche arrogance is not worth a hen.

The fairy's discourse on "gentillnesse" may be read with instruction in every moderu republic. There is everywhere in Chaucer a clear perception of the realities of life, a gentle contempt for the common follies of men, for the false dreams in which they are fond of living, and the dreadful deeds they commit in their delusions. For, covered in their selfish fancies of ambition, avarice, revenge, what have they not done, how have they not suffered ? The Monk's Tale describes all the fatal consequences of human passions. Peter of Spaine, Adam, Samson and Delilah, Hugelin of Pise (Ugolino), and