they, with greyhounds
and furs, greasy and fat, and full of dalliances; at home in taverns,
unprincipled but agreeable vagabonds, who cheat and rob the people, and
make a mockery of what is most sacred on the earth. These privileged
mendicants, with their relics and indulgences, their arts and their
lies, and the scandals they create, are treated by Chaucer with blended
humor and severity, showing a mind as enlightened as that of the great
scholar at Oxford, who heads the movement against Rome and the abuses at
which she connived if she did not encourage. And there is something
intensely English in his disgust and scorn,--brave for his day, yet
shielded by the great duke who was at once his protector and friend, as
he was of Wyclif himself,--in his severer denunciation, and advocacy of
doctrines which neither Chaucer nor the Duke of Lancaster understood,
and which, if they had, they would not have sympathized with nor
encouraged. In these attacks on ecclesiastics and ecclesiastical
abuses, Chaucer should be studied with Wyclif and the early reformers,
although he would not have gone so far as they, and led, unlike them, a
worldly life. Thus by these poems he has rendered a service to his
country, outside his literary legacy, which has always been held in
value. The father of English poetry belonged to the school of progress
and of inquiry, like his great contemporaries on the Continent. But
while he paints the manners, customs, and characters of the fourteenth
century, he does not throw light on the great ideas which agitated or
enslaved the age. He is too real and practical for that. He describes
the outward, not the inner life. He was not serious enough--I doubt if
he was learned enough--to enter into the disquisitions of schoolmen, or
the mazes of the scholastic philosophy, or the meditations of almost
inspired sages. It is not the joys of heaven or the terrors of hell on
which he discourses, but of men and women as they lived around him, in
their daily habits and occupations. We must go to Wyclif if we would
know the theological or philosophical doctrines which interested the
learned. Chaucer only tells how monks and friars lived, not how they
speculated or preached. We see enough, however, to feel that he was
emancipated from the ideas of the Middle Ages, and had cast off their
gloom, their superstition, and their despair. The only things he liked
of those dreary times were their courts of love and their
chivalric