seems to us as much a part of him
as his love of books. It is unlikely that his personality will over
become more fully known than it is at present; nor is there anything in
respect of which we seem to see so clearly into his inner nature, as
with regard to these twin predilections, to which he remains true in
all his works, and in all his moods. While the study of books was his
chief passion, nature was his chief joy and solace; while his genius
enabled him to transfuse what he read in the former, what came home to
him in the latter was akin to that genius itself; for he at times
reminds us of his own fresh Canace, whom he describes as looking so
full of happiness during her walk through the wood at sunrise:--

What for the season, what for the morning
And for the fowles that she hearde sing,
For right anon she wiste what they meant
Right by their song, and knew all their intent.

If the above view of Chaucer's character and intellectual tastes and
tendencies be in the main correct, there will seem to be nothing
paradoxical in describing his literary progress, so far as its data are
ascertainable, as a most steady and regular one. Very few men awake to
find themselves either famous or great of a sudden, and perhaps as few
poets as other men, though it may be heresy against a venerable maxim
to say so. Chaucer's works form a clearly recognisable series of steps
towards the highest achievement of which, under the circumstances in
which he lived and wrote, he can be held to have been capable; and his
long and arduous self-training, whether consciously or not directed to
a particular end, was of that sure kind from which genius itself
derives strength. His beginnings as a writer were dictated, partly by
the impulse of that imitative faculty which, in poetic natures, is the
usual precursor of the creative, partly by the influence of prevailing
tastes and the absence of native English literary predecessors whom,
considering the circumstances of his life and the nature of his
temperament, he could have found it a congenial task to follow. French
poems were, accordingly, his earliest models; but fortunately (unlike
Gower, whom it is so instructive to compare with Chaucer, precisely
because the one lacked that gift of genius which the other possessed)
he seems at once to have resolved to make use for his poetical writings
of his native speech. In no way, therefore, could he have begun his
career with so happy