ours de
force, were happier than he had been before them. Or we may refer to
the description of the preparations for the tournament and of the
tournament itself in the "Knight's Tale," or to the thoroughly Dutch
picture of a disturbance in a farm-yard in the "Nun's Priest's." The
vividness with which Chaucer describes scenes and events as if he had
them before his own eyes, was no doubt, in the first instance, a result
of his own imaginative temperament; but one would probably not go wrong
in attributing the fulness of the use which he made of this gift to the
influence of his Italian studies--more especially to those which led
him to Dante, whose multitudinous characters and scenes impress
themselves with so singular and immediate a definiteness upon the
imagination. At the same time, Chaucer's resources seem inexhaustible
for filling up or rounding off his narratives with the aid of
chivalrous love or religious legend, by the introduction of samples of
scholastic discourse or devices of personal or general allegory. He
commands, where necessary, a rhetorician's readiness of illustration,
and a masque-writer's inventiveness, as to machinery; he can even (in
the "House of Fame") conjure up an elaborate but self-consistent
phantasmagory of his own, and continue it with a fulness proving that
his fancy would not be at a loss for supplying even more materials than
he cares to employ.

But Chaucer's poetry derived its power to please from yet another
quality; and in this he was the first of our English poets to emulate
the poets of the two literatures to which in the matter of his
productions, and in the ornaments of his diction, he owed so much.
There is in his verse a music which hardly ever wholly loses itself,
and which at times is as sweet as that in any English poet after him.

This assertion is not one which is likely to be gainsaid at the present
day, when there is not a single lover of Chaucer who would sit down
contented with Dryden's condescending mixture of censure and praise.
"The verse of Chaucer," he wrote, "I confess, is not harmonious to us.
They who lived with him, and some time after him, thought it musical;
and it continues so, even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers
of Lydgate and Gower, his contemporaries: there is a rude sweetness of
a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not
perfect." At the same time, it is no doubt necessary, in order to
verify the correctness