There is no stucco about it, and it will bear the rudest weather of time. Of his defects

"Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa."

Chaucer reminds me oftenest of Crabbe, in the unstudied plainness of his sentiment, and the minuteness of his descriptions. But, in Crabbe's poetry, Tyburn-tree is seen looming up in the distance, and the bell of the parish workhouse is heard ringing. It had been better for Crabbe, if he had studied Chaucer more and Pope less. The frigid artificiality of his verse often contrasts almost ludicrously with the rudeness of his theme. It is Captain Kidd in a starched cambric neckloth and white gloves. When Chaucer describes his Shipman, we seem to smell tar.

"There also was a Shipman from far West;
For aught I know, in Dartmouth he abode;
Well as he could upon a hack he rode,
All in a shirt of tow-cloth to the knee;
A dagger hanging by a lace had he,
About his neck, under his arm adown;
The summer's heat had made his hue all brown.
He was a right good fellow certainly,
And many a cargo of good wine had he

Run from Bordeaux while the exciseman slept;
Of a nice conscience no great care he kept,
If that he fought and had the upper hand,
By water he sent them home to every land;
But in his craft to reckon well the tides,
The deep sea currents, and the shoals besides,
The sun's height and the moon's, and pilotage,
There was none such from Hull unto Carthage ;
Hardy he was and wise, I undertake;

His beard had felt full many a tempest's shake;

He knew well all the havens as they were
From Gothland to the Cape de Finisterre,
And every creek in Brittany and Spain;
His trusty bark was named the Magdelaine.”

JOHN.

The "savage Rosa" never dashed the lights and shades upon one of his bandits with more bold and picturesque effect. How that storm-grizzled beard stands out from the canvass! The effect is

so real, that it seems as if the brown old sea-king had sat for his portrait, and that every stroke of the brush had been laid on within reach of the dagger hanging at his side. Witness the amiable tints thrown in here and there, to palliate a grim wrinkle or a shaggy eyebrow. The poet takes care to tell us that

"He was a right good fellow certainly,"

lest his sitter take umbrage at the recital of his smuggling exploits in the next verse. And then with what a rough kind of humor he lets us into the secret of his murderous propensities, by hinting that he gave a passage home by water to those of whom he got the upper hand. In spite of the would-be good-humored leer, the cut-throat look shows through. It may be very pleasant riding with him as far as Canterbury, and we might even laugh at his clumsiness in the saddle, but we feel all the while that we had rather not be overhauled by him upon the high seas. His short and easy method of sending acquaintances thus casually made to their respective homes, by water,

we should not be inclined to admire so much as he himself would; especially if, as a preliminary step, he should attempt to add to the convenience of our respiratory organs with that ugly dagger of his, by opening a larger aperture somewhere nearer to the lungs. We should be inclined to distrust those extraordinary powers of natation for which he would give us credit. Even Lord Byron, I imagine, would dislike to mount that steed that "knew its rider' so well, or even to "lay his hand upon its mane," if our friend, the Shipman, held the stirrup.

PHILIP.

The whole prologue to the Canterbury Tales is equally admirable, but there is not time for me to read the whole. You must do that for yourself. I only give you a bunch or two of grapes. To enjoy the fruit in its perfection, you must go into the vineyard yourself, and pluck it with the bloom on, before the flavor of the sunshine has yet faded out of it; enjoying the play of light upon the leaves also, and the apt disposition of the clusters, each lending a grace to the other.

JOHN.

grapes

Your metaphor pleases me. I like the better than the wine which is pressed out of them, and they seem to me a fitting emblem of Chaucer's natural innocence. Elizabeth Barrett, a woman whose genius I admire, says very beautifully of Chaucer,

"Old Chaucer, with his infantine,
Familiar clasp of things divine,

That stain upon his lips is wine."

I had rather think it pure grape-juice.

The

first two lines take hold of my heart so that I believe them intuitively, and doubt not but my larger acquaintance with Chaucer will prove them to be

true.

PHILIP.

I admire them as much as you do, and to me they seem to condense all that can be said of Chaucer. But one must know him thoroughly to feel their truth and fitness fully. At the first glimpse you get of his face, you are struck with the merry twinkle of his eye, and the suppressed smile upon his lips, which betrays itself as surely as a child in playing hide-and-seek. It is hard to believe that so happy a spirit can have ever felt the galling of that

"Chain wherewith we are darkly bound,"

or have beaten its vain wings against the insensible gates of that awful mystery whose key can never be enticed from the hand of the warder, Death. But presently the broad, quiet forehead, the look of patient earnestness, and the benignant reverence of the slightly bowed head, make us quite forget the lightsome impression of our first look. Yet in the next moment it comes back upon us again more strongly than ever. Humor is al

ways a main ingredient in highly poetical natures. It is almost always the superficial indication of a rich vein of pathos, nay, of tragic feeling, below. Wordsworth seems to be an exception. Yet there is a gleam of it in his sketch of that philosopher

"Who could peep and botanize

Upon his mother's grave,"

and of a grim, reluctant sort in some parts of Peter Bell and the Wagoner. But he was glad to sink a shaft beneath the surface, where he could gather the more precious ore, and dwell retired from the jeers of a boorish world. In Chaucer's poetry, the humor is playing all the time round the horizon, like heat-lightning. It is unexpected and unpredictable, but as soon as you turn away from watching for it, behold, it flashes again as innocently and softly as ever. It mingles even with his pathos, sometimes. The laughing eyes of Thalia gleam through the tragic mask she holds before her face. In spite of your cold-water prejudices, I must confess that I like Miss Barrett's third line as well as the others. But while we are wandering so far from the poor old widow's yard, that fox, "full of iniquity,"

"That new Iscariot, new Ganelon,

That false dissimulator, Greek Sinòn,"

as Chaucer calls him, may have made clean away with our noble friend Sir Chaunticlere.