the most
characteristic testimony to his genius will be found in the prologue to
his Canterbury Tales; a work entirely and exclusively his own, which can
seldom be said of his poetry, and the vivid delineations of which
perhaps very few writers but Shakspeare could have equalled. As the
first original English poet, if we except Langland, as the inventor of
our most approved measure, as an improver, though with too much
innovation, of our language, and as a faithful witness to the manners of
his age, Chaucer would deserve our reverence, if he had not also
intrinsic claims for excellences, which do not depend upon any
collateral considerations.

[Sidenote: Revival of ancient learning.]

[Sidenote: In the twelfth century;]

The last circumstance which I shall mention, as having contributed to
restore society from the intellectual degradation into which it had
fallen during the dark ages, is the revival of classical learning. The
Latin language indeed, in which all legal instruments were drawn up, and
of which all ecclesiastics availed themselves in their epistolary
intercourse, as well as in their more solemn proceedings, had never
ceased to be familiar. Though many solecisms and barbarous words occur
in the writings of what were called learned men, they possessed a
fluency of expression in Latin which does not often occur at present.
During the dark ages, however, properly so called, or the period from
the sixth to the eleventh century, we chiefly meet with quotations from
the Vulgate or from theological writers. Nevertheless, quotations from
the Latin poets are hardly to be called unusual. Virgil, Ovid, Statius,
and Horace, are brought forward by those who aspired to some literary
reputation, especially during the better periods of that long twilight,
the reigns of Charlemagne and his son in France, part of the tenth
century in Germany, and the eleventh in both. The prose writers of Rome
are not so familiar, but in quotations we are apt to find the poets
preferred; and it is certain that a few could be named who were not
ignorant of Cicero, Sallust, and Livy. A considerable change took place
in the course of the twelfth century. The polite literature, as well as
the abstruser science of antiquity, became the subject of cultivation.
Several writers of that age, in different parts of Europe, are
distinguished more or less for elegance, though not absolute purity of
Latin style; and for their acquaintance with those anci