d 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_."[93] And again: "He is a perpetual fountain
of good sense." It is by a large, free, sound representation of things,
that poetry, this high criticism of life, has truth of substance; and
Chaucer's poetry has truth of substance.

Of his style and manner, if we think first of the romance-poetry and
then of Chaucer's divine liquidness of diction, his divine fluidity of
movement, it is difficult to speak temperately. They are irresistible,
and justify all the rapture with which his successors speak of his "gold
dew-drops of speech." Johnson misses the point entirely when he finds
fault with Dryden for ascribing to Chaucer the first refinement of our
numbers, and says that Gower[94] also can show smooth numbers and easy
rhymes. The refinement of our numbers means something far more than
this. A nation may have versifiers with smooth numbers and easy rhymes,
and yet may have no real poetry at all. Chaucer is the father of our
splendid English poetry; he is our "well of English undefiled," because
by the lovely charm of his diction, the lovely charm of his movement, he
makes an epoch and founds a tradition.

In Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, we can follow the tradition of
the li