er of English prose, no
original work being so ancient as his Travels. But the translation of
the Bible and other writings by Wicliffe, nearly thirty years
afterwards, taught us the copiousness and energy of which our native
dialect was capable; and it was employed in the fifteenth century by two
writers of distinguished merit, Bishop Pecock and Sir John Fortescue.

[Sidenote: Chaucer.]

But the principal ornament of our English literature was Geoffrey
Chaucer, who, with Dante and Petrarch, fills up the triumvirate of great
poets in the middle ages. Chaucer was born in 1328, and his life
extended to the last year of the fourteenth century. That rude and
ignorant generation was not likely to feel the admiration of native
genius as warmly as the compatriots of Petrarch; but he enjoyed the
favour of Edward III., and still more conspicuously of John duke of
Lancaster; his fortunes were far more prosperous than have usually been
the lot of poets; and a reputation was established beyond competition in
his lifetime, from which no succeeding generation has withheld its
sanction. I cannot, in my own taste, go completely along with the
eulogies that some have bestowed upon Chaucer, who seems to me to have
wanted grandeur, where he is original, both in conception and in
language. But in vivacity of imagination and ease of expression, he is
above all poets of the middle time, and comparable perhaps to the
greatest of those who have followed. He invented, or rather introduced
from France, and employed with facility the regular iambic couplet; and
though it was not to be expected that he should perceive the capacities
latent in that measure, his versification, to which he accommodated a
very licentious and arbitrary pronunciation, is uniform and
harmonious.[896] It is chiefly, indeed, as a comic poet, and a minute
observer of manners and circumstances, that Chaucer excels. In serious
and moral poetry he is frequently languid and diffuse; but he springs
like Antaeus from the earth, when his subject changes to coarse satire,
or merry narrative. Among his more elevated compositions, the Knight's
Tale is abundantly sufficient to immortalize Chaucer, since it would be
difficult to find any where a story better conducted, or told with more
animation and strength of fancy. The second place may be given to his
Troilus and Creseide, a beautiful and interesting poem, though enfeebled
by expansion. But perhaps the most eminent, or at any rate