wned with
laurel, like Petrarch, or even, like Dante, speaking with proud
humility of "the beautiful style that has done honour to him," while
acknowledging his obligation for it to a great predecessor? Chaucer
again and again disclaims all boasts of perfection, or pretensions to
pre-eminence, as a poet. His Canterbury Pilgrims have in his name to
disavow, like Persius, having slept on Mount Parnassus, or possessing
"rhetoric" enough to describe a heroine's beauty; and he openly allows
that his spirit grows dull as he grows older, and that he finds a
difficulty as a translator in matching his rhymes to his French
original. He acknowledges as incontestable the superiority of the
poets of classical antiquity:--

--Little book, no writing thou envy,
But subject be to all true poesy,
And kiss the steps, where'er thou seest space
Of Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, Stace (Statius).

But more than this. In the "House of Fame" he expressly disclaims
having in his light and imperfect verse sought to pretend to "mastery"
in the art poetical; and in a charmingly expressed passage of the
"Prologue" to the "Legend of Good Women" he describes himself as merely
following in the wake of those who have already reaped the harvest of
amorous song, and have carried away the corn:--

And I come after, gleaning here and there,
And am full glad if I can find an ear
Of any goodly word that ye have left.

Modesty of this stamp is perfectly compatible with a certain
self-consciousness which is hardly ever absent from greatness, and
which at all events supplies a stimulus not easily dispensed with
except by sustained effort on the part of a poet. The two qualities
seem naturally to combine into that self-containedness (very different
from self-contentedness) which distinguishes Chaucer, and which helps
to give to his writings a manliness of tone, the direct opposite of the
irretentive querulousness found in so great a number of poets in all
times. He cannot indeed be said to maintain an absolute reserve
concerning himself and his affairs in his writings; but as he grows
older, he seems to become less and less inclined to take the public
into his confidence, or to speak of himself except in a pleasantly
light and incidental fashion. And in the same spirit he seems, without
ever folding his hands in his lap, or ceasing to be a busy man and an
assiduous author, to have grown indifferent to the lack of brilliant
success in lif