ral literary progress. The mere scholarship of
youth, even if it be the reverse of close and profound, is wont to
cling to a man through life and to assert its modest claims at any
season; and thus, Chaucer's school-learning exercised little influence
either of an advancing or of a retarding kind upon the full development
of his genius. Nowhere is he so truly himself as in the masterpiece of
his last years. For the "Canterbury Tales," in which he is at once
greatest, most original, and most catholic in the choice of materials
as well as in moral sympathies, bears the unmistakeable stamp of having
formed the crowning labour of his life--a work which death alone
prevented him from completing.

It may be said, without presumption, that such a general view as this
leaves ample room for all reasonable theories as to the chronology and
sequence, where these remain more or less unsettled, of Chaucer's
indisputably genuine works. In any case, there is no poet whom, if
only as an exercise in critical analysis, it is more interesting to
study and re-study in connexion with the circumstances of his literary
progress. He still, as has been seen, belongs to the Middle Ages, but
to a period in which the noblest ideals of these Middle Ages are
already beginning to pale and their mightiest institutions to quake
around him; in which learning continues to be in the main
scholasticism, the linking of argument with argument, and the
accumulation of authority upon authority, and poetry remains to a great
extent the crabbedness of clerks or the formality of courts. Again,
Chaucer is mediaeval in tricks of style and turns of phrase; he often
contents himself with the tritest of figures and the most unrefreshing
of ancient devices, and freely resorts to a mixture of names and
associations belonging to his own times with others derived from other
ages. This want of literary perspective is a sure sign of
mediaevalism, and one which has amused the world, or has jarred upon
it, since the Renascence taught men to study both classical and
biblical antiquity as realities, and not merely as a succession of
pictures or of tapestries on a wall. Chaucer mingles things mediaeval
and things classical as freely as he brackets King David with the
philosopher Seneca, or Judas Iscariot with the Greek "dissimulator"
Sinon. His Dido, mounted on a stout palfrey paper white of hue, with a
red-and-gold saddle embroidered and embossed, resembles Alice Perre