although certain of the
passages relating to Constance and Griselda in their deep distresses are
unrivalled in tenderness, neither passion, nor natural description, nor
pathos, are his striking characteristics. It is his shrewdness, his
conciseness, his ever-present humour, his frequent irony, and his short,
homely line--effective as the play of the short Roman sword--which
strikes the reader most. In the "Prologue to the Canterbury Tales"--by
far the ripest thing he has done--he seems to be writing the easiest,
most idiomatic prose, but it is poetry all the while. He is a poet of
natural manner, dealing with out-door life. Perhaps, on the whole, the
writer who most resembles him--superficial differences apart--is
Fielding. In both there is constant shrewdness and common-sense, a
constant feeling of the comic side of things, a moral instinct which
escapes in irony, never in denunciation or fanaticism; no remarkable
spirituality of feeling, an acceptance of the world as a pleasant enough
place, provided good dinners and a sufficiency of cash are to be had, and
that healthy relish for fact and reality, and scorn of humbug of all
kinds, especially of that particular phase of it which makes one appear
better than one is, which--for want of a better term--we are accustomed
to call _English_. Chaucer was a Conservative in all his feelings; he
liked to poke his fun at the clergy, but he was not of the stuff of which
martyrs are made. He loved good eating and drinking, and studious
leisure and peace; and although in his ordinary moods shrewd, and
observant, and satirical, his higher genius would now and then splendidly
assert itself--and behold the tournament at Athens, where kings are
combatants and Emily the prize; or the little boat, containing the
brain-bewildered Constance and her child, wandering hither and thither on
the friendly sea.

Chaucer was born about 1328, and died about 1380; and although he had,
both in Scotland and England, contemporaries and immediate successors, no
one of them can be compared with him for a moment. The "Moral Gower" was
his friend, and inherited his tediousness and pedantry without a sparkle
of his fancy, passion, humour, wisdom, and good spirits. Occleve and
Lydgate followed in the next generation; and although their names are
retained in literary histories, no line or sentence of theirs has found a
place in human memory. The Scottish contemporary of Chaucer was Barbour,
who alth