emblem writing. Each is in four lines of rhyme; two lines first represent the image, the next two the application, thus "Of al this world the wyde compas Hit wil not in myn armés tweyne : * Litel therof he shal distreyne." A poem on "The First Age," chiefly based on the fifth metre of the second book of "The Consolation of Philosophy," puts into music the old dream of a primal state of innocence, when men drank water and ate mast and haws, and when handmills and ploughs, swords and spears, were yet to come. Lastly, in his short poem of "Good Counsel," said to have been written when near death, Chaucer advised man to be true, peaceable, and patient, look up on high, thank God for all, be led by the spirit, not by the flesh—— "That thee is sent, receive in buxomness, The wrestling for this world asketh a fall. Forth, pilgrim forth! Forth, beast, out of thy stall! Hold the high way, and let thy ghost thee lede: Among Quarles's "Emblems" (1635) this image is expressed by a picture above lines beginning, "O how our widened arms can over-stretch Their own dimensions!" THE "Canterbury Tales" express the whole power of Chaucer; yet it is only by such a study as we have now made of the sequence of his other works, that we can be fairly qualified to understand the poet while we are delighting in this chief group Chaucer's of his poems. There are two obstacles to a study of Chaucer himself in the "Canterbury Tales." One is the essentially dramatic spirit in which he occupied himself with his design, giving to his pilgrims of either sex all the variety of rank and character that he could fairly group into a single company, in order that, through them and their stories, he might reach to a broad view of life in its most typical forms, fleshly and spiritual. Had the mind of Chaucer stirred among us in the days of Queen Elizabeth, his works would have been plays, and Shakespeare might have found his match. But, except in the miracle plays and mysteries, which seldom represented ordinary human life, there was in Chaucer's time no writing formally dramatic. Dramatic genius could only speak through such poems as were acceptable to the readers of that generation; and through such poems, therefore, Chaucer poured his images of life, bright with variety of incident, and subtle in perception of all forms of character. He had that highest form of genius which can touch every part of human life, and, at the contact, be stirred to a simple sympathetic utterance. Out of a sympathy so large, good humour flows unforced, and the pathos shines upon us with a rare tranquillity. The meanness or the grandeur, fleshly grossness or ideal beauty, of each form of life, is reflected back from the unrippled mirror of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," as from no other work of man, except the Plays of Shakespeare. Chaucer alone. comes near to Shakespeare in that supreme quality of the dramatist which enables him to show the characters of men as they are betrayed by men themselves, wholly developed as if from within, not as described from without by an imperfect and prejudiced observer. It is a part of the same quality that makes noticeable in Chaucer, as in Shakespeare, the variety and truth of his different creations of women. As the range of Shakespeare was from Imogen to Dame Quickly and lower, so the range of Chaucer is from the ideal patience of the wife Griselda, or the girlish innocence and grace of Emelie in the " Knight's Tale," to the Wife of Bath and lower; and in each of these great poets the predominating sense is of the beauty and honour of true womanhood. If there were many Englishmen who read what we have of the "Canterbury Tales" straight through, it would not be necessary to say that, even in the fragment as it stands, expression of the poet's sense of the worth and beauty of womanhood very greatly predominates over his satire of the weaknesses of women. His satire, too, is genial. For the lowest he has no scorn, as he has for the hypocrisies of men who wear religion as the cloak to their offences. We have seen something of this in his transformation of Boccaccio's impure Cressida into a woman whose true dignity and perfect delicacy is slowly undermined. So, too, the transformed Pandarus jests, gossips, proses, and plots through the poem, being shown dispassionately as a character that we might see in life, and of which we are to think as we think of our living neighbours. Yet he is so shown, that, as Sir Philip Sidney said, we have "the Terentian Gnatho and our Chaucer's Pandar so exprest, that we now use their names to signify their trades." * And let us not forget that Boccaccio described his Pandar, unconscious of infamy in his part, as a young and honourable knight. It was only when we compared the English poem with its Italian original, and saw thereby in what spirit Chaucer had worked, that we could distinguish the mind of the English poet while we read his "Troylus and Criseyde." And thus it is that, to a considerable extent, although not altogether, in the "Canterbury Tales," as in the plays of Shakespeare, the dramatic genius of Chaucer has obscured his personality. The second obstacle to a study of Chaucer himself in the "Canterbury Tales" is the fact that we have but little indication of the order in which they were written, or of the relation of any one of them to a particular time of his life. The works of his which have been hitherto discussed were usually upon themes more or less personal, and we were seldom without some indication of the time when they were written. Therefore it was possible so far to connect them with his life, as slowly, point by point, to make them furnish cumulative evidence as to a few essential features in his character. We have seen, for example, that, in a sense of his own, he takes the Daisy for his flower; and rises high above all poets of his age in honour to marriage, and praise of the purity of the wife's white daisy crown. stories written by Chaucer at wide intervals, and very various in merit, were, in the last years of his life, being transformed into "Canterbury Tales." These express all his power, represent his whole mind, from the lightest jest to the profoundest earnest. They gather rays, as it were, out of all the quarters of his life; but its horizon is not to be measured in the little sun they form. * Sidney's "Defence of Poesie." But Ten months before his death, Chaucer moved into the house in the garden of St. Mary's Chapel, Westminster, of which he then took a long lease. It is not likely, although possible, that when he did that he was upon his death-bed. If the appendage to the "Canterbury Tales," which appears in most MSS. as Chaucer's retractation, be not the invention of some stupidly well-meaning monk, but was obtained from Chaucer himself, then we must suppose a period at the close of his life during which his intellect was clouded; and he took his knowledge of himself, as well as the lease of his house, from his clerical landlords. It is more probable that the retractation is a monk's revenge upon the satirist of cowled hypocrisy, and that in his new house Chaucer went on with his latest occupations until he was seized with his last illness, a few months, or weeks, or days, or hours before his end. If So, it was in that house in the garden of St. Mary's Chapel, Westminster, that he ceased from his work upon the "Canterbury Tales." Not half of it was done, and what was done lay by the poet's writingtable yet imperfectly arranged, when his prosperous eldest son, Thomas, whose right it was to do so, doubtless fulfilled his duty in taking charge of his dead father's papers. Geoffrey Chaucer, who had taken delight from his youth up in the lively genius of Boccaccio, while repelled by the reflection of Italian morals in his images of life, had drawn from Boccaccio's "Decameron" the first hint of his crowning effort as a writer. He would form a collection of the stories he had rhymed or might yet rhyme, which he could leave behind him firmly bound together by a device like that which has, for all time, made one work of the hundred tales of the "Decameron." But Chaucer's plan was better than that of the "Decameron," and looked to a much greater result. "Forth, pilgrim, forth!" The English poet must have felt his mastery as he set his pilgrims on their way, and had every incitement to proceed with a work in |