be own sister of Dame Quickly. Charity itself could not say much for her, and yet Chaucer has nothing to say against her. He presents her; there she is in her rank strong life, and he is rather inclined to like her for being so much alive. For Chaucer, like Shakespeare, is enamoured of life; life fascinates and holds him. Her story, when after repeated protests she does begin to tell it, is worth noting, for Chaucer makes her quote Ovid and Dante, and it is moral and sentimental in tone. But one must remember that Ovid, at least, was one of the most popular authors of that age, and that the dame's fifth husband was a great reader. Moreover, in the last lines she deduces from the tale a highly characteristic lesson. It is, however, only when she, or any other of the pilgrims, is talking in the interludes, that whatever each says is perfectly appropriate to the character.

The great bulk of the Canterbury Tales is written in the heroic couplet, which Chaucer was the first to employ in English, having found it in the French of Machault, from whom he borrowed also the sevenlined stanza used in Troilus and Criseyde and four of the Canterbury Tales. An example of this (which came to be called "rhyme royal" because of its use by Chaucer's disciple, the poet King James I. of Scotland) may be given from the Clerk's Tale. It is taken from Grisilde's reply to her husband's order to take that she brought with her and begone.

But ther as ye me profré swich dowaire
As I first broghte, it is wel in my mynde
It were my wrecched clothes, nothyng faire,
The whiche to me were hard now for to fynde.
O goode God, how gentil and how kynde
Ye semed by youre speche and youre visage
The day that maked was our mariage!
But sooth is seyd, algate I fynde it trewe,
For in effect it preeved is on me,

Love is noght oold as whan that it is newe!
But certės, lord, for noon adversitee,
To dyen in the cas, it shal not bee

That ever in word or werk I shal repente

That I yow yaf myn herte in hool entente.

Two other things should be noted.

Chaucer

himself is called on for a tale, and the host, railing him, gives a notion of his appearance.

'What man artow?' quod he;

'Thou lokest as thou woldest finde an hare,
For ever up-on the ground I see thee stare.

Approché neer, and loke up merily.

Now war yow, sirs, and lat this man have place;
He in the waast is shape as wel as I ;
This were a popet in an arm t' enbrace
For any womman, smal and fair of face-
He semeth elvish by his contenaunce,
For un-to no wight dooth he daliaunce.'

Chaucer responds with the rhyme of Sir Thopas, which is a parody on the rambling doggerel romances popular in his day, till mine host interrupts

Na moore of this for Godde's dignitee.

And Chaucer then turns to a prose 'Tale of Melibeus,' which, to speak the truth, is not much livelier. Also the conclusion of the Tales is a moral prose discourse by the Poor Parson, an admirable but tedious pilgrim. And to the end of certain manuscripts of the Tales is added a prose Retractation, in which Chaucer beseeches God's mercy for having written nearly all that he ever did write. It should be taken into account in any estimate of the man. But it may fairly be said that if Chaucer had left us nothing but what he exempts from censure -chief among which is a prose version of Boethius -the world would have been infinitely the poorer and none the better. Out of verse he was no artist;

and three centuries had to elapse before men manipulated the language in prose with the supple freedom that Chaucer showed in his less moral writings. No one can call the Canterbury Tales exactly edifying; Chaucer lived in an age that was plainer spoken than ours, and he was a courtier at a court which was certainly no school of the virtues. But he brought unembittered through the long trial of precarious dependence a sunny gaiety which is the great charm of his work. "Gentleness and

cheerfulness are the perfect virtues," said Stevenson, "they come before all morality." And Chaucer was undoubtedly, and teaches to be, both gentle and cheerful.

CHAPTER II.

SPENSER.

NOTHING more fully proves the precocity, as it were, of Chaucer's genius than the long gap which succeeds him. Nearly two hundred years had to elapse from the time when he made his pilgrimage before English literature could show anything worthy to be set beside the Canterbury Tales. But when the new burst of poetry came it came with a rush. In 1579 English literature had little of worth but Chaucer: within thirty years it was the richest of all spoken tongues. Two schools of literary art, contemporary in time but distinct in tendency, wrought this change. These were, first, the group of court poets and critics, from which issued Spenser's Faerie Queene, the swan-song of mediaevalism; and, secondly, the group of actors and playwrights and professional writers who, under the ban of Church and Government, and the contempt of the critics, brought modern poetry obscurely to the birth.

Edmund Spenser was born about 1552 at London, of gentle parentage and well connected. Educated at Merchant Taylor's School, he went with a scholarship to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, at the age of

seventeen; and so early as this he was translating Petrarch's sonnets with remarkable mastery. He stayed at Cambridge for seven years (till 1576), and then spent some time in Lancashire, before he came to London, attached to Leicester's household. During this later period, after his departure from Cambridge, he was in love with a lady who rejected his love, the 'Rosalind,' whose beauty and cruelty are celebrated by him in many of his shorter poems. In October, 1579, was published his first important work, The Shepheards Calender, and the long deferred advent of a new and true poet was immediately recognised.

Two men had a great influence in moulding Spenser's mind. One was Gabriel Harvey, fellow of Pembroke, a pedant of much ability. The other was Sir Philip Sidney, the most brilliant of Elizabeth's courtiers, who had adopted enthusiastically Harvey's academic theories. The general result of these theories may be summed up thus: That the true aim of literature was to convey moral instruction; that all literature should imitate the Greek and Latin models; that the drama should observe unity of time and place, and keep tragedy and comedy distinct; and lastly, that rhyme was an ignoble artifice, and that English should adopt the classic method of scansion by long and short syllables. The effect of this was to make Sidney and Spenser both waste much time in composing lamentable hexameters, and to estrange both from the popular drama. Gradually, however, each of the two escaped from the theories; and Sidney has left, in his series of sonnets Astrophel and Stella, the record of a passionate love story in very beautiful and natural verse, while Spenser is among the three or four great masters of English metre.

But Harvey's influence may be answerable