the pleasant Oxford Clerk with more logic than money, and more simplicity than either, full of learning and "high sentence," the good Wife of Bath with her hosen Ful streite yteyed, and shoon ful moist and new: and the Poor Parson, a most delightful character, "rich of holy thought and werk ;"-Don't you see them? MASON. Perfectly well. GRAY. If we would write well, that is naturally, we cannot become too familiar with this English Homer. Dryden says, that Spenser more than once insinuates, that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body; a remark sufficiently characteristic to be true, although I have not discovered such an expression in his works. No stronger proof of the vitiated taste of Cowley can be offered, than his dislike of Chaucer, whom he "read over," at the request of the Earl of Leicester. Dryden suggests, that the courtly poet, shocked at his rough and antique style, never searched into his good sense. He had not the curiosity to force his way into a garden through a few brambles. MASON. Chaucer's morning scenes are peculiarly sweet and lively. You feel that the poet rose with the lark, and made the lamb his curfew. He never over-lays his descriptions with what Aristotle called λαμπρα λεξις. They glow only with the light of Nature. GRAY. Chaucer was to the fourteenth, what Spenser was to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. No path in the history of our poetry is so beaten as the one to this Fountain. But these gleams of early sunshine died with him; and the dreary gloom that succeeded, was deepened by the remembrance of the vernal promise so quickly faded. Nevertheless, the seeds were in the ground to spring up and ripen after many Summers. Chaucer bestowed upon Gower, the title of "Moral Gower," and the most inquiring critic could find no epithet more descriptive of his mind. He appears to have been an amiable man, imbued with the massive learning of his age, which he pours out in an unceasing stream of sententious gravity. Pope said rightly, that there was little worth reading in him, though I much doubt his acquaintance with the Confessio Amantis. MASON. You think him inferior to Lydgate? GRAY. Infinitely.-Lydgate had fancy and feeling, and is not wanting in melody. He was born in Suffolk, in a town of the same name, as he informs us in the epilogue to the Fall of Princes*. Born in a village which is called Lydgate Time what St. Edmund's martyr, maid and king, We know, also, that he was a monk of the Benedictine Monastery at St. Edmund's Bury. He must have been, at least, thirty years old when Chaucer died. In reading the works of Lydgate, you are annoyed by that tedious and protracted form of narrative, which is the characteristic of the early poetry of every nation, as, indeed, it is of the uneducated in all ages. A story, he said, could not be plainly told, when "constrained under words few." These oakes great be not down yhewe First at a stroke. Certainly the thousand little touches with which a lively gossip heightens her tale, impart an air of *See Gray's remarks on Lydgate, in Mathias' edition of his works. familiar truth and sincerity; and, indeed, circumstance, skilfully introduced, constitutes a principal charm in the greatest poems. The Iliad and Odyssey are full of it. Hector taking off his helmet to allay the terror of his child, who turned away its little face in alarm, is a beautiful example. Virgil, by whom all the artifices of thought and diction were exhausted, avails himself of this aid continually. Take the following picture of Troïlus transfixed in his chariot by the spear of Achilles: Parte alia fugiens amissis Troïlus armis, Per terram, et versa pulvis inscribitur hasta. The trailing of the spear along the sand, in the last line, brings the whole scene before us. Lydgate often carries his descriptions home to the heart in this manner; so does Chaucer, as in Cresseide weeping with dishevelled hair for the departure of Troïlus,—and in those vivid verses, where we see the fire leap out from the helmets, beneath the strokes of the combatants : Among the tuftes brode, bright and shene, MASON. Shakspeare, before whom the Muse never wore a veil, understood the full power of circumstance; nor could a hundred pages of description have brought the desolate husband and father on the stage half so vividly as that single exclamation of Rosse: What man! ne'er pull your hat upon your brows. A very pathetic scene of this kind occurs in Warner's great poem, Albion's England, where the mother, Conuvenna, attempts to reconcile two angry brothers, by recalling to their remembrance her early care and watchfulness over their infancy. And again, in the story of Daphles, the daughter of King Aganippus, who having vanquished a nobleman in arms against her dominion, becomes enamoured of the captive, whom she visits in his dungeon. But entering, when her eyes beheld the image of her heart, To her still peerless, tho' his bands had alter'd him in part; She, casting down her bashful eyes, stood senseless then a space, Yet what her tongueless love adjourn'd, was extant in her face. |