His

Garden upon a river in a green mead;

The gravel gold, the water pure as glass,

and "the eglantine and sycamore arbour, so thickly woven, where the

priers who stood without all day could not discover whether any one was

within," was assuredly some particular garden. The stately grove has all

the characters of its trees--the oak, the ash, and the fir--to "the

fresh hawthorn,"

Which in white motley that so swote doth smell.

In all these lovely scenes there was a delicious sense of joyous

existence; the inmates of the forest burst forth, from "the little

conies, the beasts of gentle kind," to "the dreadful roe and the buck,"

and from their green leaves they who "with voice of angels" entranced

the poet-musician--

So loud they sang that all the woodes rung

Like as it should shiver in pieces small,

And as methought that the Nightingale

With so great might her voice out-wrest,

Right as her heart for love would brest (burst).

So true is the accidental remark of the celebrated Charles Fox, that "of

all poets Chaucer seems to have been the fondest of the singing of

birds." These were the peculiar delights in the poetic habits of

Chaucer, who was an early riser, and often mused on many a rondel in

gardens, and meads, and woods, at earliest dawn. This poet's sun-risings

are the most exhilarating in our poetry.

We may doubt if the vernal scenes of Chaucer can be partaken by his more

chilly posterity. Did England in the seasons of Chaucer flourish with a

more genial May and a more refulgent June? Or should we suspect that the

travelled poet clothed our soil with the luxuriance of Provencal fancy,

and borrowed the clear azure of Italy to soften the British roughness

even of our skies?

Tyrwhit, the able commentator of Chaucer, has thrown out an incidental

remark, which seems equally refined and true. "Chaucer in his serious

pieces often follows his author with the servility of a mere translator;

and in consequence his narration is jejune and constrained (as often

appears in the "Romaunt of the Rose" and his translations of Dante),

whereas in the comic he is generally satisfied with borrowing a slight

hint of his subject, which he varies, enlarges, and embellishes at

pleasure, and gives the whole the air and colour of an original; a sure

sign that his genius rather led him to compositions of the latter kind."

This remark is an instance of critical sagacity. The creative faculty in

Chaucer had not broken forth in his translations, which evidently were

his earliest writings. The native bent of his genius, the hilarity of

his temper, betrays itself by playful strokes of raillery and concealed

satire when least expected. His fine irony may have sometimes left his

commendations, or even the objects of his admiration, in a very

ambiguous condition. The learned editor of the second part of the

"Paston Letters" hence has been induced to infer that the spirit of

chivalry, from the reign of the third Edward, had entirely declined, and

only existed in the forms of conventional and fashionable society, and

had sunk into a mere foppery, a system of forms and etiquettes, because

Chaucer, a court-poet, treats with irony the chivalric manners. Whether

this ingenious inference will hold with literary antiquaries, I will not

decide; but I am inclined to suspect that Chaucer's indulgence of his

taste for irony was not in the mind of this learned editor. Our poet has

stamped with his immortal ridicule the tale told in his own person--"The

Rime of Sir Thopas," which is considered as a burlesque of the metrical

romances. In those days there was an inundation of these romances, as

"the thirst and hunger" of the present is accommodated with as spurious

a brood. We have our "drafty prose" as they had their "drafty riming."

But shall we infer from this ludicrous effusion of the great poet, that

he held so light the venerable fablers, the ancient romancers, with

whose "better parts" he had nourished his own genius? This is his own

confession. Often in his years of grief, when the poet wondered

How he lived, for day ne night,

I may not sleep--

Sitting upright in my bed,

then it was that he prescribed for his "secret sorrows" that medicine

which, "drunk deeply," makes us forget ourselves. In those hours the

poet

Bade one reach me a Boke,

A ROMANCE, and he it me took

To read, and drive the Night away;

For methought it better play

Than play either at Chess or Tables.

And assuredly Chaucer found many passages in the old fablers not less

entrancing than some of his own. Our poet indulged this vein of playful

irony on persons as well as on things. A sly panegyric, sufficiently

ambiguous for us to accept as a refined stroke, we find on the abstruse

and interminable question of predestination; on which the Nonne's priest

declares--

But I ne cannot boult it to the bren,

As can the holy doctor Augustin,

Or Boece, or _the bishop Bradwardin_.

As this bishop, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, was the first who

treated theology on mathematical principles, and likewise wrote on the

"Quadrature of the Circle," we may presume "Bishop Bradwardin" rather

perplexed the poet. Chaucer discovers his ironical manner when gravely

stating the different theories of dreaming--

---------What causeth Suevenes[3]

On the morrow or on evens?

he playfully concludes, and modern philosophy could no better assist the

inquiry--

---------Whoso of these Miracles

The causes know bet[4] than I

Define he, for I certainly

Ne can them not, ne never thinke

To busie my witte for to swinke

To know why this is more than that is,

Well worthe of this thing Clerkes,

That treaten of this and of other werkes,

For I, of none opinion

Nil.

It is with the same pleasantry he avoids all commonplace descriptions,

by playfully suggesting his pretended unskilfulness for the detail, or

his want of learning--

Me list not of the chaf, ne of the stre,

Maken so long a tale, as of the corn.

"Man of Lawe's Ta'e."

Yet humour and irony are not his only excellences, for those who study

Chaucer know that this great poet has thoughts that dissolve in

tenderness; no one has more skilfully touched the more hidden springs of

the heart.

The Herculean labour of CHAUCER was the creation of a new style. In this

he was as fortunate as he was likewise unhappy. He mingled with the

native rudeness of our English words of Provencal fancy, and some of

French and of Latin growth. He banished the superannuated and the

uncouth, and softened the churlish nature of our hard Anglo-Saxon; but

the poet had nearly endangered the novel diction when his artificial

pedantry assumed what he called "the ornate style" in "the Romaunt of

the Rose," and in his "Troilus and Cressida." This "ornate style"

introduced sesquipedalian Latinisms, words of immense dimensions, that

could not hide their vacuity of thought. Chaucer seems deserted by his

genius when "the ornate style" betrays his pangs and his anxiety. As the

error of a fine genius becomes the error of many, because monstrous

protuberances may be copied, while the softened lines of beauty remain

inimitable, this "ornate style" corrupted inferior writers, who, losing

all relish of the natural feeling and graceful simplicity of their

master, filled their verse with noise and nonsense. This vicious style,

a century afterwards, was resumed by STEPHEN HAWES. We have, however, a

glorious evidence, amid this struggle both with a new and with a false

style, of Chaucer's native good taste; he finally wholly abandoned this

artificial diction; and his later productions, no longer disfigured by

such tortured phrases and such remote words, awaken our sympathy in the

familiar language of life and passion.

TYRWHIT has ingeniously constructed a metrical system to arrange the

versification to the ear of a modern reader; by this contrivance he

would have removed all obstructions in the pronunciation and in the

syllabic quantities. He maintained that the lines were regular

decasyllabics. But who can read this poet for any length, even the

"Canterbury Tales" in the elaborated text of Tyrwhit, without being

reminded of its fallacy? Even the E final, on which our critic has laid

such stress, though often sounded, assuredly is sometimes mute. Dan

Chaucer makes at his pleasure words long or short, and dyssyllabic or

trisyllabic; and this he has himself told us--

But for the rime is light and lewde,

Yet make it somewhat agreable,

Though some verse fail in a syllable.

Our critic was often puzzled by his own ingenuity, for in some

inveterate cases he has thrown out in despair an observation, that "a

reader who cannot perform such operations for himself (that is, helping

out the metre) had better not trouble his head about the versification

of our ancient authors." The verse of Chaucer seems more carefully

regulated in his later work, "the Tales;" but it is evident that Chaucer

trusted his cadences to his ear, and his verse is therefore usually

rhythmical, and accidentally metrical.

On a particular occasion the poet submitted to the restraint of equal

syllables, as we discover in "The Court of Love," elaborately metrical,

and addressed to "his princely lady," with the hope that she might not

refuse it "for lack of ornate speech." It is evident, therefore, that

Chaucer had a distinct conception of the heroic or decasyllabic verse,

but he did not consider that the mechanical construction of his verse

was essential to the free spirit of his fancy. "I am no metrician," he

once exclaimed; he wrote

Books, songs, ditees

In RIME, or else in CADENCE.

"The House of Fame."

This circumstance arose from the custom of the age, when poems were

_recited_, and not _read_; readers there were none among the people,

though auditors were never wanting; it was much the same among the

higher orders. Poems were usually performed in plain chant, and a verse

was musical by the modulation of the harp. There was no typographical

metre placed under the eye of the reciter; the melody of the poet too

often depended on the adroitness of the performer; and the only

publishers of the popular poems of Chaucer were the harpers, who, in

stately halls on festal days, entranced their audience with Chaucer's

Tale, or his "Ballade." His poem of "Troilus and Cressida," although

almost as long as the Aeneid, was intended to be _sung_ to the harp as

well as _read_, as the poet himself tells us, in addressing his poem---

And _redde_ where so thou be, or elles _sung_.

In the most ancient manuscripts of Chaucer's works the caesura in every

line is carefully noted, to preserve the rhythmical cadence with

precision; without this precaution the harmony of such loose

versification would be lost. In the later editions, when the race of

roaming minstrels had departed, and our verse had become solely

metrical, the printers omitted this guide to the ancient recitation. We

perceive this want in the uncertain measures of Chaucer's versification;

and a dexterous modulation is still required to catch the recitative of

Chaucer's poems.

Are the works of our great poet to be consigned to the literary dungeon

of the antiquary's closet? I fear that there is more than one

obstruction which intervenes between the poet's name, which will never

die, and the poet's works, which will never be read. A massive tome,

dark with the Gothic type, whose obsolete words and difficult phrases,

and, for us, uncadenced metre, are to be conned by a glossary as

obsolete as the text, to be perpetually referred to, to the interruption

of all poetry and all patience, appalled even the thorough-paced

antiquary, Samuel Pegge, as appears by his honest confession. Already a

practised bibliosopher proclaims, alluding to the edition by Tyrwhit of

Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," "And who reads any other portion of the

poet?" Yet the "Canterbury Tales" are but the smallest portion of

Chaucer's works! But some skilful critics have perpended and decided

differently: even among the projected labours of Johnson was an edition

of Chaucer's works; and Godwin, when diligently occupied on this great

poet, with just severity observed that "a vulgar judgment had been

propagated by slothful and indolent persons, that the 'Canterbury Tales'

are the only part of the works of Chaucer worthy the attention of a

modern reader, and this has contributed to the wretched state in which

his works are permitted to exist."

Are we then no longer to linger over the visionary emotions of the great

poet in the fine portraitures of his genius from his youthful days, when

the fever of his soul, not knowing where to seek for its true aliment,

careless of life, fed on its own sad musings, in Chaucer's "DREME," or,

onwards in life, in the "TESTAMENT OF LOVE," that chronicle of the heart

in a prison solitude? And are we no longer interested in those personal

traits Chaucer has so frequently dropped of his own tastes and humours,

so that we are in fact better acquainted with Chaucer than we are with

Shakspeare? Even during his official occupations, this poet loved his

studious solitary nights, and frequently alludes to his passion. Must we

close that "HOUSE OF FAME," with whose fragments Pope reared "The

Temple?" Has all the enchantment of the moonlight-land of chivalry and

fairyism in "THE FLOURE AND THE LEAFE" vanished? Are we no longer to

listen to "THE COMPLAINT OF THE BLACK KNIGHT," which touched a duchess

or a queen? or the stanzas of "THE CUCKOO AND THE NIGHTINGALE," which

musically resound that musical encounter? Is the legend of pathetic

tenderness in the impassioned "TROILUS," and "the sillie woman who

falsed Troilus," ever to be closed? there may we pursue the vicissitudes

of love, in what the poet calls "a little tragedy;" and we find Ovidian

graces amid its utter simplicity. There are, indeed, vicissitudes of

taste as well as of love. "Troilus and Cressida" was the favourite in

the days of Henry VIII. over the "Canterbury Tales" and "The Floure and

the Leafe;" it was, too, the model of Sidney in the court of Elizabeth;

Love triumphed at court over Humour and Fancy.

It is true that the language of Chaucer has failed, but not the writer.

The marble which Chaucer sculptured has betrayed the noble hand of the

artist; the statue was finished; but the grey and spotty veins came

forth, clouding the lucid whiteness.

For the poet or the poetical, the difficulty of the language may be

surmounted with a reasonable portion of every-day patience. I know, from

several of my literary contemporaries, that this, however, has not been

conceded. The more familiar I became with Chaucer, the more I delighted

in the significance of the Chaucerian words. From some modern critics,

occasionally the name of Chaucer startles the ear. One, indeed, has

recently complained that "Chaucer's divine qualities are languidly

acknowledged by his unjust countrymen;"[5] and Coleridge emphatically

said, "I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is

especially delicious in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is!"[6]

But the popularity of this gifted child of nature, and this shrewd

observer of mankind, is doomed to another obstruction than that of his

curious diction. The playfulness of his comic invention, and the freedom

of his simplicity, will no longer be allowed to atone for the levity of

some of his incidents. When Warton, to display the genuine vein of the

Chaucerian humour, imprudently analysed the "Miller's Tale," having

reached the middle, the critic, recollecting himself, suddenly breaks

off with a curt remark--"The sequel cannot be repeated here!" In a

recklessness of all knowledge, and in an unhappy hour, the poet of "Don

Juan" decided, while he probably would have started from Chaucer's

black-letter tome, that "Chaucer, notwithstanding the praises bestowed

on him, I think obscene and contemptible. He owed his celebrity merely

to his antiquity." As if the greatest of our poets had only been

celebrated in the day when Byron wrote! Yet in all the unfettered

invention and nudity of style, there was no grossness in the temper, and

less in the habits, of the poet. He addressed his own age as his

contemporaries were doing in France and in Italy, and from whom he had

borrowed the very two tales on which this censure has fallen. In telling

"a merrie tale," Chaucer could not have anticipated this charge; and, in

truth, for subjects which are obscene and disgustful he had no taste, as

he showed in his reproof of Gower for having selected two repulsive

ones--the unnatural passions of Canace and Apollonius Tyrius. Of these

our Chaucer cries,--

Of all swiche cursed stories I say, Fy!

Our poet has himself pleaded that having fixed on his personage, he had

no choice to tell any other tale than what that individual would himself

have told. Before we immolate Chaucer on the altar of the Graces, we

should not only listen to his plea, but to his own easy remedy for this

disorder produced by his too faithful copy after nature.

--------Whoso list not to hear,

Turn over the leaf, and chese another tale!

Our notions and our customs of delicacy are the result of a change in

our manners of no distant period; and, compared with our neighbours,

many are still but conventional. They are so even in respect to

ourselves, for, not to go back to the golden days of Elizabeth, the

language and the manners of the court of Anne would have startled modern

decorum. The "polite conversation" of Swift has fortunately preserved

for us specimens which we could not have imagined. Our poems, our

comedies, and our tales, so late as the days of Swift and Pope, have

allusions, and even incidents and descriptions, which we no longer

tolerate. How far our fastidiousness lies on the surface of our lesser

morals, I will not decide; but men of genius have complained that this

fastidiousness has become too restrictive, by contracting the sphere of

inventive humour, which flashes often in such small matters as ludicrous

tales and playful levities, which must not lie on our tables.

Chaucer long remained a favourite in the most polite circles; Aubrey, at

the close of the seventeenth century, in his "Idea," recommends the

study of Chaucer, as the poet in full reputation. At a later period, the

days of Dryden and Pope, our versifiers were continually renovating his

humour and his more elegant fictions. OGLE, with others, attempted to

modernize Chaucer; but it is as impossible to give such a version of

Chaucer as to translate the Odes of Horace. They corrupted by their

interpolations, and weakened by their diffusion; Chaucer was not

discernible in the dimness of their paraphrase. The great beauties of

Chaucer spring up from the soil in which they lie embedded; and the most

skilful hand will discover that in gathering the flower it must cease to

live without its root.

We never possessed a tolerably correct edition of this master-poet; and

the very circumstance of the continued popularity of the poems with the

many has occasioned their present wretched condition. When works

circulated in their manuscript state, before the era of printing, the

popularity of a poet made his text the more liable to corruption.

Multiplied transcripts were produced by heedless or licentious scribes,

whose careless omissions, and whose perpetuated blunders and even

interpolations can only be credited by the collators of the manuscripts

of Chaucer. This happened with the very first printed edition by Caxton.

Our patriarchal publisher discovered that he had printed from a very

faulty manuscript, and, in that primitive age of simplicity and

printing, nobly suppressed the edition which dishonoured the author, and

substituted an improved one. Doubtless GOWER, a grave and learned poet,

whose copies are remarkably elegant, has descended to us in a purer

condition than CHAUCER, for he was rarely transcribed. Speght was the

first editor who gave a more complete edition of Chaucer, with the

useful appendage of a glossary, the first of its kind, and which has

been a fortunate acquisition for later glossographers. But Speght, with

the aid of Stowe, who was equally industrious, was so deficient in

critical acumen, as to have impounded any stray on the common stamped

with the initials of Chaucer. Thus our poet has suffered all the

mischances of faithless scribes, unintelligent printers, and uncritical

editors. To make the bad worse, the last modern edition of Chaucer, by

URRY, though recommended by the white letter, offering this bland relief

to a modern reader, is a showy volume, of which we are forbidden to read

a line! The history of this edition is an evidence how ill our scholars,

at no remote period, were qualified to decide on the fate of a great

vernacular author. Urry, the pupil of Dean Aldrich, and the friend of

Bishop Atterbury, appears to have been one of that galaxy or confederacy

of wits called "the Wits of Christ Church." The "Student of Christ

Church, Oxon," offered a title and a place which would sanction an

edition of Chaucer; one object of which was to contribute five hundred

pounds to finish Peckwater Quadrangle. The pompous folio appeared

heralded by the queen's licence for the exclusive sale for fourteen

years. Our editor at first seems to have been reluctant and modest, till

instigated by his great patrons to divest himself of all fear of the

author. In his innocence conceiving that the strokes of his own pen

would silently improve an obsolete genius, this merciless interpolator,

changing words and syllables at pleasure, has furnished a text which

Chaucer never wrote![7] If the worst edition that was ever published

contributed to finish Peckwater Quadrangle, it is amusing to be reminded

that causes are often strangely disproportionate to their effects.

The famous portion of Chaucer's Miscellaneous Volume has been fortunate

in the editorial cares of TYRWHIT. Tyrwhit, a scholar as well as an

antiquary, was an expert philologer; his extensive reading in the lore

of our vernacular literature and our national antiquities promptly

supplied what could not have entered into his more classical studies;

and his sagacity seems to have decided on the various readings of all

the manuscripts, by piercing into the core of the poet's thoughts.[8]

It is remarkable that some of the most lively productions of several

great writers have been the work of their maturest age. Johnson

surpassed all his preceding labours in his last work, the popular Lives

of the Poets. The "Canterbury Tales" of Chaucer were the effusions of

his advanced age, and the congenial verses of Dryden were thrown out in

the luxuriance of his later days. Milton might have been classed among

the minor poets had he not lived to be old enough to become the most

sublime. Let it be a source of consolation, if not of triumph, in a long

studious life of true genius, to know that the imagination may not

decline with the vigour of the frame which holds it; there has been no

old age for many men of genius.

We must lament that at such an early period in our vernacular

literature, we have to record that the two fathers of our poetry,

congenial spirits as they were, too closely resembled most of their

sons--in one of the most painful infirmities of genius. I have said

elsewhere that jealousy, long supposed to be the offspring of little

minds, is not, however, confined to them. We do not possess the secret

history of the two great poets, Chaucer and Gower; but we are told by

Berthelet in his edition of Gower's "Confessio Amantis," when he quotes

the commendatory lines on Gower by Chaucer, that the poets "were both

excellently learned, _both great friendes together_." Ancient

biographers usually fall into this vague style of eulogy, which served

their purpose rather than a more critical research. True it is that

"they were both great friends," but, what Berthelet has not told, they

became also "both great enemies." We know that Chaucer has commemorated

the dignified merits of "the moral Gower," and that Gower has poured

forth an effusion not less fervid than elegant from the lips of Venus,

who calls Chaucer "her own clerk, who in the flower of his youth had

made ditees and songes glad which have filled the land." Did this little

passion of poetic jealousy creep into their great souls? Else how did it

happen that Chaucer, who had once solicited the correcting hand of his

friend, in his latest work, reprehended the sage and the poet, and that

Gower, who had not stinted the rich meed of his eulogy which appeared in

the first copies of his "Confessio Amantis," erased the immortality

which he had bestowed. The justice of their reciprocal praise neither of

these rivals could efface, for that outlives their little jealousies.