ave no bitter
traces. Tears and mental trouble, and the agonies of doubt, you cannot
think of in connexion with it; laughter is sheathed in it, the light of
a smile is diffused over it. In face and turn of genius he differs in
every respect from his successor, Spenser; and in truth, in Chaucer and
Spenser we see the fountains of the two main streams of British song:
the one flowing through the drama and the humourous narrative, the
other through the epic and the didactic poem. Chaucer rooted himself
firmly in fact, and looked out upon the world in a half-humourous,
half-melancholy mood. Spenser had but little knowledge of men as
_men_; the cardinal virtues were the personages he was acquainted with;
in everything he was "high fantastical," and, as a consequence, he
exhibits neither humour nor pathos. Chaucer was thoroughly national;
his characters, place them where he may,--in Thebes or Tartary,--are
natives of one or other of the English shires. Spenser's genius was
country-less as Ariel; search ever so diligently, you will not find an
English daisy in all his enchanted forests. Chaucer was tolerant of
everything, the vices not excepted; morally speaking, an easy-going
man, he took the world as it came, and did not fancy himself a whit
better than his fellows. Spenser was a Platonist, and fed his grave
spirit on high speculations and moralities. Severe and chivalrous,
dreaming of things to come, unsuppled by luxury, unenslaved by passion,
somewhat scornful and self-sustained, it needed but a tyrannous king,
an electrical political atmosphere, and a deeper interest in theology
to make a Puritan of him, as these things made a Puritan of Milton.
The differences between Chaucer and Spenser are seen at a glance in
their portraits. Chaucer's face is round, good-humoured,
constitutionally pensive, and thoughtful. You see in it that he has
often been amused, and that he may easily be amused again. Spenser's
is of sharper and keener feature, disdainful, and breathing that
severity which appertains to so many of the Elizabethan men. A
fourteenth-century child, with delicate prescience, would have asked
Chaucer to assist her in a strait, and would not have been
disappointed. A sixteenth-century child in like circumstances would
have shrunk from drawing on herself the regards of the sterner-looking
man. We can trace the descent of the Chaucerian face and genius in
Shakspeare and Scott, of the Spenserian in Milton and