symbol. Whether we can or not, it is certainly sugges tive of thought that the only immortal production of the greatest of recent poets was conceived and carried out in that Gothic spirit and form from which he was all his life struggling to break loose.

CHAUCER.*

WILL

ILL it do to say anything more about Chaucer? Can any one hope to say anything, not new, but even fresh, on a topic so well worn? It may well be doubted; and yet one is always the better for a walk in the morning air, a medicine which may be taken over and over again without any sense of sameness, or any failure of its invigorating quality. There is a pervading wholesomeness in the writings of this man, a vernal property that soothes and refreshes in a way of which no other has ever found the secret. I repeat to myself a thousand times,

"Whan that Aprilë with his showrës sotë

The droughte of March hath percëd to the rotë,

And bathed every veine in swich licour

Of which vertue engendered is the flour, -
When Zephyrus eek with his swetë breth
Enspired hath in every holt and heth

The tender croppës, and the yongë sonne
Hath in the ram his halfe cors yronne,
And smale foulës maken melodië,".

and still at the thousandth time a breath of uncontami

* Publications of the Chaucer Society. London. 1869-70. Étude sur G. Chaucer considéré comme imitateur des Trouvères. Par E. G. SANDRAS, Agrégé de l'Université. Paris: Auguste Dusand. 1859. 8vo. pp. 298.

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury-Geschichten, uebersetzt in den Versmassen der Urschrift, und durch Einleitung und Anmerkungen erläutert. Von WILHELM HERTZBERG. Hildburghausen. 1866. 12mo. pp. 674. Chaucer in Seinen Beziehungen zur italienischen Literatur. Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doctorwürde. Von ALFONS KISSNER. Bonn. 1867. 8vo. pp. 81.

nate springtide seems to lift the hair upon my forehead. If here be not the largior ether, the serene and motionless atmosphere of classical antiquity, we find at least the seclusum nemus, the domos placidas, and the oubliance, as Froissart so sweetly calls it, that persuade us we are in an Elysium none the less sweet that it appeals to our more purely human, one might almost say domestic, sympathies. We may say of Chaucer's muse, as Overbury of his milkmaid, "her breath is her own, which scents all the year long of June like a new-made haycock." The most hardened roué of literature can scarce confront these simple and winning graces without feeling somewhat of the unworn sentiment of his youth revive in him. Modern imaginative literature has become so self-conscious, and therefore so melancholy, that Art, which should be "the world's sweet inn," whither we repair for refreshment and repose, has become rather a watering-place, where one's own private touch of the liver-complaint is exasperated by the affluence of other sufferers whose talk is a narrative of morbid symptoms. Poets have forgotten that the first lesson of literature, no less than of life, is the learning how to burn your own smoke; that the way to be original is to be healthy; that the fresh color, so delightful in all good writing, is won by escaping from the fixed air of self into the brisk atmosphere of universal sentiments; and that to make the common marvellous, as if it were a revelation, is the test of genius. It is good to retreat now and then beyond earshot of the introspective confidences of modern literature, and to lose ourselves in the gracious worldliness of Chaucer. Here was

a healthy and hearty man, so genuine that he need not ask whether he were genuine or no, so sincere as quite to forget his own sincerity, so truly pious that he could be happy in the best world that God chose to make, so humane that he loved even the foibles of his kind. Here

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was a truly epic poet, without knowing it, who did not waste time in considering whether his age were good or bad, but quietly taking it for granted as the best that ever was or could be for him, has left us such a picture of contemporary life as no man ever painted. A perpetual fountain of good-sense," Dryden calls him, yes, and of good-humor, too, and wholesome thought. He was one of those rare authors whom, if we had met him under a porch in a shower, we should have preferred to the rain. He could be happy with a crust and springwater, and could see the shadow of his benign face in a flagon of Gascon wine without fancying Death sitting opposite to cry Supernaculum! when he had drained it. He could look to God without abjectness, and on man without contempt. The pupil of manifold experience, -scholar, courtier, soldier, ambassador, who had known poverty as a housemate and been the companion of princes, his was one of those happy temperaments that could equally enjoy both halves of culture, — the world of books and the world of men.

"Unto this day it doth mine hertë boote,

That I have had my world as in my time!"

The portrait of Chaucer, which we owe to the loving regret of his disciple Occleve, confirms the judgment of him which we make from his works. It is, I think, more engaging than that of any other poet. The downcast eyes, half sly, half meditative, the sensuous mouth, the broad brow, drooping with weight of thought, and yet with an inexpugnable youth shining out of it as from the morning forehead of a boy, are all noticeable, and not less so their harmony of placid tenderness. We are struck, too, with the smoothness of the face as of one who thought easily, whose phrase flowed naturally, and who had never puckered his brow over an unmanageable verse.

Nothing has been added to our knowledge of Chaucer's

life since Sir Harris Nicholas, with the help of original
records, weeded away the fictions by which the few facts
were choked and overshadowed. We might be sorry that
no confirmation has been found for the story, fathered
on a certain phantasmal Mr. Buckley, that Chaucer was
"fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in
Fleet Street," if it were only for the alliteration; but we
refuse to give up the meeting with Petrarch. All the
probabilities are in its favor. That Chaucer, being at
Milan, should not have found occasion to ride across so
far as Padua, for the sake of seeing the most famous lit-
erary man of the day, is incredible. If Froissart could
journey on horseback through Scotland and Wales, surely
Chaucer, whose curiosity was as lively as his, might have
ventured what would have been a mere pleasure-trip in
comparison. I cannot easily bring myself to believe that
he is not giving some touches of his own character in
that of the Clerk of Oxford:
:-

"For him was liefer have at his bed's head
A twenty bookës clothed in black and red
Of Aristotle and his philosophië
Than robës rich, or fiddle or psaltrië:
But although that he were a philosopher
Yet had he but a little gold in coffer:

Of study took he mostë care and heed;

Not one word spake he more than was need:

All that he spake it was of high prudèncë,
And short and quick, and full of great sentence;
Sounding in moral virtue was his speech

And gladly would he learn and gladly teach."

That, himself as plump as Horace, he should have described the Clerk as being lean, will be no objection to those who remember how carefully Chaucer effaces his own personality in his great poem. Our chief debt to Sir Harris Nicholas is for having disproved the story that Chaucer, imprisoned for complicity in the insurrection of John of Northampton, had set himself free by betraying