e."

IV. The largeness of his view of human nature is remarkable. Some
poets, either intentionally or unintentionally, paint one type of men
accurately and distort all the rest. Chaucer impartially portrays the
highest as well as the lowest, and the honest man as well as the
hypocrite. The pictures of the roguish Friar and the self-denying
Parish Priest, the Oxford Scholar and the Miller, the Physician and
the Shipman, are painted with equal fidelity to life. In the breadth
and kindliness of his view of life, Chaucer is a worthy predecessor of
Shakespeare. Dryden's verdict on Chaucer's poetry is: "Here is God's
plenty."

V. His love of nature is noteworthy for that early age. Such lines as
these manifest something more than a desire for rhetorical effect in
speaking of nature's phenomena:--

"Now welcom somer, with thy sonne softe,
That hast this wintres weders over-shake,
And driven awey the longe nightes blake[38]!"[39]

His affection for the daisy has for five hundred years caused many
other people to look with fonder eyes upon that flower.

VI. He stands in the front rank of those who have attempted to tell
stories in melodious verse. Lowell justly says: "One of the world's
three or four great story-tellers, he was also one of the best
versifiers that ever made English trip and sing with a gayety that
seems careless, but where every foot beats time to the tune of the
thought."

[Illustration: MORRIS DANCERS._From a Manuscript of Chaucer's
Time._]

VII. He is the first great English author to feel the influence of the
Renaissance, which did not until long afterward culminate in England.
Gower has his lover hear tales from a confessor in cloistered quiet.
Chaucer takes his Pilgrims out for jolly holidays in the April
sunshine. He shows the spirit of the Renaissance in his joy in varied
life, in his desire for knowledge of all classes of men as well as of
books, in his humor, and in his general reaching out into new fields.
He makes us feel that he lives in a merrier England, where both the
Morris dancer and the Pilgrim may show their joy in life.

What Chaucer did for the English Language.--Before Chaucer's works,
English was, as we have seen, a language of dialects. He wrote in the
Midland dialect, and aided in making that the language of England.
Lounsbury says of Chaucer's influence: "No really national language
could exist until a literature had been created which would be admired
and studied by