just, and making mankind more truly religious, because more cheerful and grateful. The editor of "Blackwood" justly prides himself on having appreciated this noble poet from the first; but it is a pity, we think, that he looks back in anger upon those whose literary educations were less fortunate;-who had been brought up in schools of a different taste, and who showed, after all, a natural strength of taste singularly honourable to them, in being able to appreciate real poetry at last, even in quarters to which the editor himself, we believe, has never yet done justice, though no man could do it better. For Wilson's prose (and we could not express our admiration of it more highly) might stretch forth its thick and rich territory by the side of Keats's poetry, like a land of congenial exuberance, a forest tempest-tost indeed, compared with those still valleys and enchanted gardens, but set in the same identical region of the remote, the luxuriant, the mythological,-governed by a more wilful and scornful spirit, but such as hates only from an inverted principle of the loving, impatient of want of sympathy, and incapable, in the last resort, of denying the beautiful wheresoever existing, because thereby it would deny the divine part of itself. Why should Christopher North revert to the errors of his critical brethren in past times, seeing that they are all now agreed, and that every one of them perhaps has something to forgive himself in his old judgments (ourselves assuredly not excepted,-if we may be allowed to name ourselves among them)? Men got angry from political differences, and were not in a temper to give dispassionate poetical judgments. And yet Wordsworth had some of his greatest praises from his severest political opponents (Hazlitt, for instance); and out of the former Scotch school of criticism, which was a French one, or that of Pope and Boileau, came the first hearty acknowledgment of the merits of Keats, for whom we were delighted the other day to find that an enthusiastic admiration is retained by the chief of that school (Jeffrey), whose natural taste has long had the rare honour of triumphing over his educational one, and who ought, we think, now that he is a Lord of Session, to follow, at his leisure moments, the example set him by the most accomplished of all national benches of judicature, and give us a book that should beat, nevertheless, all the Kameses and Woodhouselees before him; as it assuredly would. XXV. SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. No. I. GEOFFREY CHAUCER was born in London, in the year 1328, apparently of a gentleman's family, and was bred in the court of Edward the Third. He married a sister of Catherine Swynford, mistress, and afterwards wife, to the King's son, John of Gaunt; and was employed in court offices, and in a mission to Italy, where he is supposed to have had an interview with Petrarch. In the subsequent reign he fell into trouble, owing to his connexion with John of Gaunt's party and the religious reformers of those days; upon which he fled to the Continent, but returned; and, after an imprisonment of three years, was set at liberty, on condition of giving up the designs of his associates ;-a blot on the memory of this great poet, and apparently, otherwise amiable and excellent man, which he has excused as well as he could, by alleging that they treated him ill, and would have plundered and starved him. He died in the year 1400, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to which he had had a house on the site where Henry the Seventh's chapel now stands: so that the reader, in going along the pavement there, is walking where Chaucer once lived. His person, in advanced life, tended to corpulency; and he had a habit of looking down. In conversation he was modest, and of few words. He was so fond of reading, that he says he took heed of nothing in comparison, and would sit at his books till he dimmed his eyes. The only thing that took him from them was a walk in the fields. Chaucer (with Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton) is one of the Four Great English Poets; and it is with double justice that he is called the Father of English Poetry, for, as Dante did with Italian, he helped to form its very language. Nay, it burst into luxuriance in his hands, like a sudden month of May. Instead of giving you the idea of an "old" poet, in the sense which the word vulgarly acquires, there is no one, upon acquaintance, who seems so young, consistently with maturity of mind. His poetry rises in the land like a clear morning, in which you see everything with a rare and crystal distinctness, from the mountain to the minutest flower,-towns, solitudes, human beings,-open doors, showing you the interior of cottages and of palaces,fancies in the clouds, fairy-rings in the grass; and in the midst of all sits the mild poet, alone, his eyes on the ground, yet with his heart full of everything round him, beating, perhaps, with the bosoms of a whole city, whose multitudes are sharing his thoughts with the daisy. His nature is the greatest poet's nature, omitting nothing in its sympathy (in which respect he is nearer to Shakspeare than either of their two illustrious brethren); and he combines an epic power of grand, comprehensive, and primitive imagery, with that of being contented with the smallest matter of fact near him, and of luxuriating in pure vague animal spirits, like a dozer in a field. His gaiety is equal to his gravity, and his sincerity to both. You could as little think of doubting his word, as the point of the pen that wrote it. It cuts as clear and sharp into you, as the pen on the paper. His belief in the good and beautiful is childlike; as Shakspeare's is that of everlasting and manly youth. Spenser's and Milton's are more scholarly and formal. Chaucer excels in pathos, in humour, in satire, character, and description. His graphic faculty, and healthy sense of the material, strongly ally him to the painter; and perhaps a better idea could not be given of his universality than by saying, that he was at once the Italian and the Flemish painter of his time, and exhibited the pure expression of Raphael, the devotional intensity of Domenechino, the colour and corporeal fire of Titian, the manners of Hogarth, and the homely domesticities of Ostade and Teniers ! His faults are, coarseness, which was that of his age, and in some of his poems, tediousness, which is to be attributed to the same cause, a book being a book in those days, written by few, and when it was written, tempting the author to cram into it everything that he had learned, in default of there being any encyclopædias. That tediousness was no innate fault of the poet's, is strikingly manifest, not only from the nature of his genius, but from the fact of his throwing it aside as he grew older and more confident, and spoke in his own person. The "Canterbury Tales," his last and greatest work, is almost entirely free from it, except where he gives us a long prose discourse, after the fashion of the day; and in no respect is his "Palamon and Arcite more remarkable, than in the exquisite judgment with which he has omitted everything superfluous in his prolix original, "The Teseide," the work of the great and poeticalnatured, but not great poet, Boccaccio ;-(for Boccaccio's heart and nature were poems; but he could not develop them well in verse.) Our In proceeding to give specimens from the works of the father of our verse, the abundance which lies before us is perplexing, and, in order to do anything like justice, we are constrained to be unjust to his context, and to be more piecemeal than is desirable. extracts are from the volumes lately given to the world by Mr. Clarke, entitled the "Riches of Chaucer," in which the spelling is modernised, and the old pronunciation marked with accents, so as to show the smoothness of the versification. That Chaucer is not only a smooth, but a powerful and various versifier, is among the wonders of his advance beyond his age; but it is still doubtful, whether his prosody was always correct in the modern sense, that is to say, whether all his lines contain the regulated number of syllables, or whether he does not sometimes make time stand for number; or, in other words, a strong and hearty emphasis on one syllable perform the part of two,-as in the verse which will be met with below, about the monk on horseback; of whom he says, that With him there was his son, a youngé Squièr, A lover and a lusty bacheler, With lockés curl'd as they were laid in press; Embroidered was he, as it were a mead There was also a Nun, a Prioress: [A touch of good satire that might tell now!] At meaté she was well ytaught withal, Well could she carry a morsel, and well keep. [These are the elegancies which it was thought necessary to teach in that age.] But for to speaken of her conscience; [What a charming verse is that !] THE MONK. A Monk there was, a fair for the mast'ry, The rule of Saint Maure and of Saint Bene't, His head was bald, and shone as any glass, His bootés supple, his horse in great estate; Now certainly he was a fair prelate: [Of the sly and accommodating Friar we are told, that] Full streetely heard he confessión, This was a couplet that used to delight the late Mr. Hazlitt. To give it its full gusto, it should be read with a syllabical precision, after the fashion of Dominie Sampson. THE SCHOLAR, Him was lever 2 have at his bed's head A noble verse, containing all the zeal and single-heartedness of a true love of knowledge. The account of THE SAILOR. A Shipman was there, wonéd far by west; [He rode upon a hack-horse as well as he could.] All in a gown of falding to the knee. A dagger hanging by a lace had he The hoté summer had made his hue all brown: And certainly he was a good fellaw; Full many a draught of wine he haddé draw If that he fought and had the higher hand, SEVERAL of Chaucer's best poems are translations from the Italian and French, but of so exquisite a kind, so improved in character, so enlivened with fresh natural touches and freed from comparative superfluity (in some instances, freed from all superfluity) that they justly take the rank of originals. We are sorry that we have not the poem of Boccaccio by us, from which he took the "Knight's Tale," containing the passages that follow,-in order that we might prove this to the reader; but it is lucky perhaps in other respects, for it would have led us beyond our limits; and all that we pro fess in these extracts, is to give just so many passages of an author as shall suffice for evidence of his various characteristics. We take, from his garden, specimens of the flowers for which he is eminent, and send them before the public as in a horticultural show. To see them in their due juxtaposition and abundance, we must refer to the gardens themselves; to which it is of course one of our objects to tempt the beholder. PHYSICAL LIFE AND MOVEMENT. A young knight going a-Maying. Compare the saliency, and freshness, and natural language of the following description of Arcite going a-Maying, with the more artificial version of the passage in Dryden. Sir Walter Scott says of it, that the modern poet must yield to the ancient, in spite of "the beauty of his versification." But with all due respect to Sir Walter, here is the versification itself, as superior in its impulsive melody, even to Dryden's, as a thoroughly unaffected beauty is to a beauty half spoilt. The busy lark, the messenger of day, [An admirable image! He means those sudden catches and impulses of a fiery horse, analogous to the shifting starts of a flame in action ;] Is ridden to the fieldés, him to play, Out of the court, were it a mile or tway; [These are the mixtures of the particular with the general, by which natural poets come home to us ;] And to the grove of which that I you told, ["I hope that I may get some green here :"an expression a little more off-hand and trusting, and fit for the season, than the conventional common-places of the passage in Dryden "For thee, sweet month, the groves green liveries wear! !" &c.] PORTRAITS OF TWO WARRIOR KINGS. There mayst thou see, coming with Palamon, Licurge himself, the greaté king of Thrace, Black was his beard, and manly was his face; [Here was Dryden's and Pope's turn of line anticipated under its most popular form.] The circles of his eyen in his head With combed hairés on his browés stout; [That is to say, a forehead of the simplest, potent appearance, with no pains taken to set it out.] His limbés great, his brawnés hard and strong, [There's a noble line, with the monosyllable for a climax!] His coat-armour was of a cloth of Tars; Couchéd with pearlés white and round and great; His crispé hair like ringés was y-run, [He does not omit the general impression, notwithstanding all these particulars. You may see his portrait close or at a distance, as you please.] Of five-and-twenty years his age I cast 14; A hundred lordés had he with him there, For trusteth well, that earlés, dukés, kinges, XXVII. SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER. NO, III-HIS PATHOS. CHAUCER'S pathos is true nature's it goes directly to its object. His sympathy is not fashion'd and clipped by modes and respects; and herein, indeed, he was lucky in the comparatively homely breeding of his age, and in the dearth of books. His feelings were not rendered critical and timid. Observe the second line, for instance, of the following verses. The glossaries tell us that the word "swelt" means fainted-died. There may be a Saxon word with such a meaning-but luckily for nature and Chaucer, there is another Saxon word, swell, of which swell'd is the past tense, and most assuredly this is the word here; as the reader will feel instantly. No man, however much in love, faints "full oft a day" but he may swell, as the poet says, that is to say, heave his bosom and body with the venting of his long suspended breath, and say, Alas! The fainting is unnatural; the sigh and the heaving is most natural, and most admirably expressed by this homely word. We have therefore spelt it accordingly, to suit the rest of the orthography. THE UNHAPPY LOVER. (From the Knight's Tale.) When that Arcite to Thebés comen was, And shortly to concluden all his woe. So muckle sorrow had never creáture That is, or shall be, while the world may dure: His hue sallow, and pale as ashes cold; And solitary he was and ever alone, And wailing all the night, making his moan; And if he heardé song or instrument, Then would he weepe; he might not be stent. That is, could not be stopped; the wilful, washing, self-pitying tears would flow. This touch about the music is exquisite. Dryden, writing for the court of Charles the Second, does not dare to let Arcite weep, when he hears music. He restricts him to a gentlemanly sigh He sighs when songs or instruments he hears. 1 Believe me. The third person singular, had the force, in those days, of the imperative. • More. 45 Mo" is still to be found in the old version of the Psalmis. The cold ashes, which have lost their fire (we have the phrase still "as pale as ashes") he turns to "sapless boxen leaves," (a classical simile); and far be it from him to venture to say "swell." No gentleman ever "swell'd;" certainly not with sighing, whatever he might have done with drinking. But instead of that, the modern poet does not mind indulging him with a good canting common-place, in the style of the fustian tragedies. He raved with all the madness of despair: Dry sorrow in his stupid eyes appears, It was not sufficient, that upon the principle of extremes meeting, the excess of sorrow was unable to weep,-that even self-pity seemed When the fine gentlemen of the court of Charles the Second, and when Charles wasted. himself, wept (see Pepys), it was when they grew maudlin over their wine, and thought how piteous it was that such good eaters and drinkers should not have everything else to their liking. But let us not run the risk of forgetting the merits of Dryden, in comparing him with a poet so much the greater. THE SAME LOVER DYING. Alas the woe! alas the painés strong Alas mine heartés queen! Alas my wife! "Alas," it is to be observed, was the common expression of grief in those days; and all these repetitions of it only show the loud, wilful selfcommiseration, natural to dying people of a violent turn of mind, as this lover was. But he was also truly in love, and a gentleman. See how he continues: Mine heartés lady, ender of my life! What is this world? What asken men to have? Alone, withouten any company. How admirably expressed the difference between warm social life, and the cold solitary grave! How piteous the tautology-" Alonewithouten any company!" Farewell, my sweet;-farewell, mine Emily. He has had an unjust quarrel with his rival and once beloved friend, Palamon : I have here with my cousin Palamon, So surely guide my soul. A lady's servant or lover. |