to form an opinion. But we know that
(the cavilling spirit of Chaucer's burlesque "Rhyme of Sir Thopas"
notwithstanding) the efforts of English metrical romance in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were neither few nor feeble,
although these romances were chiefly translations, sometimes
abridgments to boot--even the Arthurian cycle having been only imported
across the Channel, though it may have thus come back to its original
home. There is some animation in at least one famous chronicle in
verse, dating from about the close of the thirteenth century; there is
real spirit in the war-songs of Minot in the middle of the fourteenth;
and from about its beginnings dates a satire full of broad fun
concerning the jolly life led by the monks. But none of these works or
of those contemporary with them show that innate lightness and buoyancy
of tone, which seems to add wings to the art of poetry. Nowhere had
the English mind found so real an opportunity of poetic utterance in
the days of Chaucer's own youth as in Langland's unique work, national
in its allegorical form and in its alliterative metre; and nowhere had
this utterance been more stern and severe.

No sooner, however, has Chaucer made his appearance as a poet, than he
seems to show what mistress's badge he wears, which party of the two
that have at most times divided among them a national literature and
its representatives he intends to follow. The burden of his song is
"Si douce est la marguerite:" he has learnt the ways of French
gallantry as if to the manner born, and thus becomes, as it were
without hesitation or effort, the first English love-poet. Nor--though
in the course of his career his range of themes, his command of
materials, and his choice of forms are widely enlarged--is the gay
banner under which he has ranged himself ever deserted by him. With
the exception of the "House of Fame," there is not one of his longer
poems of which the passion of love, under one or another of its
aspects, does not either constitute the main subject or (as in the
"Canterbury Tales") furnish the greater part of the contents. It is as
a love-poet that Gower thinks of Chaucer when paying a tribute to him
in his own verse; it is to the attacks made upon him in his character
as a love-poet, and to his consciousness of what he has achieved as
such, that he gives expression in the "Prologue" to the "Legend of Good
Women," where his fair advocate tells the God of Love:--