fusions of the kind (and this is not the only one) go for nothing in an unfinished work like the Canterbury Tales; and it was in strict keeping with the spiritual etiquette or regimen of chivalric manners and literature, that a poet should, before he died, recant or express his grief for having written romances of love, fighting, feasting, jousting, and all manere delyt of the world, the fleisch, and the divel.' This was so

strictly the proper thing to do, that it is impossible to conceive Chaucer omitting it—unless he had died suddenly. In the Romance literature we find the carrière of the Troubadour unmistakably defined. In the fine spring morning, when the birds sing in the grove, particularly in the month of May,—because that was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, he begins his career of a minstrel, with a gay paltock on his back and a guitar slung to his shoulder. The business of his life's day is 'minstralcie.' He is to sing of love, ladies, knights, flowers, birds, sunshine, and the like, not forgetting the stock figures of course, Tristram and Iseult aux blanches mains, Lancelot du Lac, and Queen Guinevere. All his life he is to compose verses of 'corrage' and 'delyt,' tinkling his guitar in bower, and hall, and tiltyard. But as the evening draws on, he is to reflect that the Church does not look with a kindly eye upon 'delyt' of any sort; and he is to take care and write something to say how very sorry he is for having written songs of love and knighthood. The state of mind and feeling which could receive so incoherent a

man.

6

And

theory of life is not intelligible to us; but it was beyond question a matter of course in Chaucer's time. however he may have intended to ridicule troubadour poetry in his Rhyme of Sir Topas,' he was too receptive a person not to take to that portion of the faith of his time which made repentance and bead-telling and a hortatory disposition the proper things in an old. We, who look upon faith, devotion, and repentance of wrong-doing as things for the whole of a man's life, and not for his old age only, cannot help smiling at the medieval view of the subject. But we must take care not to smile unkindly. The whole theory of life and duty in those days was one of classification of persons, functions, seasons, foods, and occupations. That one part of life was intended to be more religiously lived out than another would not seem so very absurd to a man whose church told him to eat no flesh on Wednesdays and Fridays, and gave him absolution for confessed sin upon penance done as often as he liked to come for it. In the Middle Ages caste was moral as well as social and civic. The knight was to put lance in rest; the clerk was to be learned, 'morall of sentaunce;' the parson was to preach, and to be a great deal more religious than his people; while those that 'ben seculare' may, by the side of all this, do pretty much as they please. This is the organisation of life; virtues and offices are divided and apportioned; and the Church overlooks the motley throng with blessing or ban in her power. I do not see any reason to doubt that the dis

claimer or recantation of which we have been speaking, is Chaucer's own.

The poet is preserved to us then by Occleve, in the guise of a penitent; and I confess, though, perhaps, some of my criticisms do not seem to correspond with the confession, I have felt some delicacy, in dealing with the man Chaucer, as to the hypothesis of character upon which I should proceed. Nothing can be more capricious than the manner in which the biographers choose or reject at pleasure quasi-biographic indications in the poetry and prose of Chaucer; but it is quite plain that the moods of his writings vary as his years change; and as I do not believe in any entity called 'the interests of literature,' or 'the interests of morality,' which ought to prevail over the duty of absolute simple justice and loyalty, even to a dead man, I am not at all sure what image of Chaucer I ought to be most anxious to leave upon the reader's mind; for his own wishes in such a matter should, unquestionably, have much weight. No man can know another man as that other man knows himself: and I am unalterably of opinion that a human being's estimate of his own character and worth is usually far more truthful than the best estimate that can be made by all the ingenuity of his friends put together. After all, however, Chaucer deliberately gave his writings to the world pretty much as they stand in print at this day, and we must take him as they represent him; from his early youth

'When I was yong at xviii yere of age

Lusty and light, desirous of plesaunce

to the time of his maturity—

'I am a married man, and yet

Thou art a merry man, quoth Wat—'

and so on, to the time of his old age, when he was 'hoor and round of schape,' and ended his days by inditing, if we are to trust the record, when he was on his death-bed in great anguish,' the verses beginning

'Flee fro the pres and duelle with sothfastnesse.'

His visible figure, at all events, stands plainly before us a large head, a little body, but with broad shoulders, and small extremities. His physical energy must have been enormous—in terms of physiology, he must have had large viscera-to support the incessant and varied labour of his life. His writings alone are voluminous, and though of course varying in merit, they are of unflagging force. Considering the state of the English language and literature of the time, it is plain that he could not have produced his poems without possessing an immense amount of the independent originating power of genius. And if the Testament of Love is not in at least some parts a translation or paraphrase, Chaucer was not only a poet but a metaphysician. Otherwise no acquaintance with the philo

sophy of his time would have carried him safely over the sensitive ground which he sometimes touches with logical sure-footedness in that remarkable book. Besides this, we have to take into account that Chaucer was not only a man of letters, but, after the manner of younger times than ours, a soldier and a man of affairs. However difficult then we may find it to discriminate between the strictly autobiographical and the merely fanciful references to himself which abound in his writings, we are forced to receive as gospel what he says in the prologue to the Legend of Good Women :

'On bokes for to rede I me delyte,

And in myn herte have hem in reverence
So hertely that ther is game noon,
That fro my bokes maketh me to goon.'

6

The business of biography is, of course, to tell the truth; and yet I sympathize with Tyrwhitt, who does not like people who are fascinated with the charms of a barren page and a meagre collection of dates.' I am intensely of Chaucer's opinion that men ought—

• To
yeve

credence

To olde stories and doon hem reverence,

And that men mosten more thyng beleve

Than they may seen at eighe or elles preve.'

In other words, I think that all tradition of persons which is not incoherent with verified facts of record, should be received into our belief, unless it affirms