ers: then chivalry and the primacy in letters passed
to Rome, and now it is come to France. God grant it may be kept there;
and that the place may please it so well, that the honour which has
come to make stay in France may never depart thence!'

Yet it is now all gone, this French romance-poetry of which the weight
of substance and the power of style are not unfairly represented by
this extract from Christian of Troyes. Only by means of the historic
estimate can we persuade ourselves not to think that any of it is of
poetical importance.

But in the fourteenth century there comes an Englishman nourished on
this poetry, taught his trade by this poetry, getting words, rhyme,
metre from this poetry; for even of that stanza which the Italians
used, and which Chaucer derived immediately from the Italians, the
basis and suggestion was probably given in France. Chaucer (I have
already named him) fascinated his contemporaries, but so too did
Christian of Troyes and Wolfram of Eschenbach. Chaucer's power of
fascination, however, is enduring; his poetical importance does not
need the assistance of the historic estimate; it is real. He is a
genuine source of joy and strength, which is flowing still for us and
will flow always. He will be read, as time goes on, far more generally
than he is read now. His language is a cause of difficulty for us; but
so also, and I think in quite as great a degree, is the language of
Burns. In Chaucer's case, as in that of Burns, it is a difficulty to
be unhesitatingly accepted and overcome.

If we ask ourselves wherein consists the immense superiority of
Chaucer's poetry over the romance-poetry--why it is that in passing
from this to Chaucer we suddenly feel ourselves to be in another world,
we shall find that his superiority is both in the substance of his
poetry and in the style of his poetry. His superiority in substance is
given by his large, free, simple, clear yet kindly view of human
life,--so unlike the total want, in the romance-poets, of all
intelligent command of it. Chaucer has not their helplessness; he has
gained the power to survey the world from a central, a truly human
point of view. We have only to call to mind the Prologue to _The
Canterbury Tales_. The right comment upon it is Dryden's: 'It is
sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that _here is God's
plenty_.' And again: 'He is a perpetual fountain of good sense.' It
is by a large, free, sound representa