sors. But the sense in which the term
naif should be understood in literary criticism is so imperfectly
agreed upon among us, that we have not yet even found an English
equivalent for the word.

To Chaucer's times, then, belongs much of what may at first sight seem
to include itself among the characteristics of his genius; while, on
the other hand, there are to be distinguished from these the influences
due to his training and studies in two literatures--the French and the
Italian. In the former of these he must have felt at home, if not by
birth and descent, at all events by social connexion, habits of life,
and ways of thought, while in the latter he, whose own country's was
still a half-fledged literary life, found ready to his hand
masterpieces of artistic maturity, lofty in conception, broad in
bearing, finished in form. There still remain, for summary review, the
elements proper to his own poetic individuality--those which mark him
out not only as the first great poet of his own nation, but as a great
poet for all times.

The poet must please; if he wishes to be successful and popular, he
must suit himself to the tastes of his public; and even if he be
indifferent to immediate fame, he must, as belonging to one of the most
impressionable, the most receptive species of humankind, live in a
sense WITH and FOR his generation. To meet this demand upon his
genius, Chaucer was born with many gifts which he carefully and
assiduously exercised in a long series of poetical experiments, and
which he was able felicitously to combine for the achievement of
results unprecedented in our literature. In readiness of descriptive
power, in brightness and variety of imagery, and in flow of diction,
Chaucer remained unequalled by any English poet, till he was
surpassed--it seems not too much to say, in all three respects--by
Spenser. His verse, where it suits his purpose, glitters, to use
Dunbar's expression, as with fresh enamel, and its hues are variegated
like those of a Flemish tapestry. Even where his descriptive
enumerations seem at first sight monotonous or perfunctory, they are in
truth graphic and true in their details, as in the list of birds in the
"Assembly of Fowls," quoted in part on an earlier page of this essay,
and in the shorter list of trees in the same poem, which is, however,
in its general features imitated from Boccaccio. Neither King James I
of Scotland, nor Spenser, who after Chaucer essayed similar t