or at both of the universities, and travelled
early into Italy, where he became thoroughly imbued with the spirit and
excellences of the great Italian poets and prose-writers, Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccace; and is said to have had a personal interview with
one of these, Petrarch. He was connected, by marriage, with the famous
John of Gaunt, through whose interest he was introduced into several
public employments. Chaucer was an active partisan, a religious
reformer, and from the share he took in some disturbances, on one
occasion, he was obliged to fly the country. On his return, he was
imprisoned, and made his peace with government, as it is said, by a
discovery of his associates. Fortitude does not appear, at any time, to
have been the distinguishing virtue of poets.--There is, however, an
obvious similarity between the practical turn of Chaucer's mind and
restless impatience of his character, and the tone of his writings. Yet
it would be too much to attribute the one to the other as cause and
effect: for Spenser, whose poetical temperament was an effeminate as
Chaucer's was stern and masculine, was equally engaged in public
affairs, and had mixed equally in the great world. So much does native
disposition predominate over accidental circumstances, moulding them to
its previous bent and purposes! For while Chaucer's intercourse with the
busy world, and collision with the actual passions and conflicting
interests of others, seemed to brace the sinews of his understanding,
and gave to his writings the air of a man who describes persons and
things that he had known and been intimately concerned in; the same
opportunities, operating on a differently constituted frame, only served
to alienate Spenser's mind the more from the "close-pent up" scenes of
ordinary life, and to make him "rive their concealing continents," to
give himself up to the unrestrained indulgence of "flowery tenderness."

It is not possible for any two writers to be more opposite in this
respect. Spenser delighted in luxurious enjoyment; Chaucer, in severe
activity of mind. As Spenser was the most romantic and visionary,
Chaucer was the most practical of all the great poets, the most a man of
business and the world. His poetry reads like history. Every thing has a
downright reality; at least in the relator's mind. A simile, or a
sentiment, is as if it were given in upon evidence. Thus he describes
Cressid's first avowal of her love.

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