harm in being a little severe upon their foibles, especially as there are no surviving relatives whose feelings can be set on edge by it. But let us come back to the poets.

PHILIP.

With all my heart. You smile when my hobby takes the bit between his teeth, but seem unconscious of your own John Gilpin excursions. My first thought was to have read you only some passages from the Elizabethan dramatists; but I have changed my mind. I remember hearing you say that the obsoleteness of Chaucer's dialect had deterred you from the attempt to read him.

JOHN.

Yes, I was desirous of a further acquaintance with a poet, whom Dryden and Pope esteemed worthy of their toil in translating. But he is impregnably hemmed in from me by a quickset hedge of obscure and antiquated phrases.

PHILIP.

So it seems, at first sight. But if you had the stout heart of the prince in the fairy tale, you would soon have broken the charm, and would have found the deserted old palace suddenly full of all the noise and bustle of every-day employment, as well as the laughter and tears of everyday life. You must put no faith at all in any idea

you may have got of Chaucer from Dryden or Pope. Dryden appreciated his original better than Pope; but neither of them had a particle of his humor, nor of the simplicity of his pathos. The strong point in Pope's displays of sentiment is in the graceful management of a cambric handkerchief. You do not believe a word that Heloïse says, and feel all the while that she is squeezing out her tears as if from a half-dry sponge. Pope was not a man to understand the quiet tenderness of Chaucer, where you almost seem to hear the hot tears falling, and the simple, choking words sobbed out. I know no author so tender as he, not even Shakspeare. There is no declamation in his grief. Dante is scarcely more downright and plain. To show you how little justice Dryden has done him, I will first read you a few lines from his version of "The Knight's Tale," and then the corresponding ones of the original. It is the death scene of Arcite.

"Conscience (that of all physic works the last)
Caused him to send for Emily in haste.
With her, at his desire, came Palamon;
Then, on his pillow raised, he thus begun :
'No language can express the smallest part
Of what I feel and suffer in my heart
For you, whom best I love and value most;
But to your service I bequeath my ghost;
Which, from this mortal body when untied,
Unseen, unheard, shall hover at your side,
Nor fright you waking, nor your sleep offend,
But wait officious, and your steps attend;

How I have loved! excuse my faltering tongue;
My spirit's feeble and my pains are strong;
This I may say: I only grieve to die,
Because I lose my charming Emily.'”

JOHN.

I am quite losing my patience. The sentiment of Giles Scroggins, and the verse of Blackmore! Surely, nothing but the meanest servility to his original could excuse such slovenly workmanship as this.

PHILIP.

There is worse to come.

Of its fidelity as a

translation you can judge for yourself, when you

hear Chaucer.

"To die when Heaven had put you in my power,
Fate could not choose a more malicious hour!
What greater curse could envious Fortune give
Than just to die when I began to live?
Vain men, how vanishing a bliss we crave!
Now warm in love, now withering in the grave!
Never, O, never more to see the sun!

Still dark in a damp vault, and still alone!
This fate is common.'

I wish you especially to bear in mind the lines I have emphasized. Notice, too, how the rhyme is impertinently forced upon the attention throughout. We can hardly help wondering if a nuncupatory testament were ever spoken in verse before. There is none of this French-lustre in Chaucer.

"Arcite must die;

For which he sendeth after Emily,
And Palamon, that was his cousin dear;
Then spake he thus, as ye shall after hear:
'Ne'er may the woful spirit in my heart
Declare one point of all my sorrow's smart,
To you, my lady, that I love the most;
But I bequeath the service of my ghost
To you aboven any cre-a-ture,

Since that my life may now no longer dure.
Alas, the woe! alas, the pains so strong,
That I for you have suffered, and so long!
Alas, the death! alas, mine Emily!
Alas, the parting of our company!

Alas, my heart's true queen! alas, my wife!
My heart's dear lady, ender of my life!

What is this world? What asketh man to have?

Alone, withouten any company!

Farewell, my sweet! farewell, mine Emily!

And softly take me in your armès twey (two arms),
For love of God, and hearken what I say.'"

JOHN.

It

Perfect! I would not have a word changed, except the second "cold" before "grave." takes away from the simplicity, and injures the effect accordingly. In the lines just before that, I could fancy that I heard the dying man gasp for breath. After hearing this, Dryden's exclamationmarks savor of the play-bills, where one sees them drawn up in platoons, as a body-guard to the name of an indifferent player; their number being increased in proportion as the attraction diminishes. And, in that seemingly redundant line,

"Alone, withouten any company,"

how does the repetition and amplification give force and bitterness to the thought, as if Arcite must need dwell on his expected loneliness, in order to feel it fully! There is nothing here about "charming Emily," "envious Fortune," no bandying of compliments. Death shows to Arcite, as he does mostly to those who are cut off suddenly in the May-time and blossom of the senses, as a bleak, bony skeleton, and nothing more. Dryden, I remember, in his "Art of Poetry," says,

"Chaucer alone, fixed on this solid base,
In his old style conserves a modern grace;
Too happy, if the freedom of his rhymes
Offended not the method of our times."

But if what you have read (unless you have softened it greatly) be a specimen of his rudeness, save us from such "method" as that of Dryden !

PHILIP.

I hardly changed a syllable. The word to which you objected, as redundant, was an addition of my own to eke out the measure; "coldè " being pronounced as two syllables in Chaucer's time. The language of the heart never grows obsolete or antiquated, but falls as musically from the tongue now as when it was first uttered. Such lustiness and health of thought and expression seldom fail of leaving issue behind them. One may trace a familylikeness to these in many of Spenser's lines, and I please myself sometimes with imagining pencilmarks of Shakspeare's against some of my favorite