Chapter 8 CHAUCER'S INFLUENCE

Few poets have received more immediate and widespread recognition than Chaucer. Fifteenth-century poetry almost wholly dominated by his influence, and one united chorus of praise and admiration rises from the lips of his successors. Shirley, who edited the Knightes Tale (amongst other works of Chaucer's) in the first half of the fifteenth century, speaks of him as "the laureal and most famous poete that euer was to-fore him as in th' embelisshing of oure rude modern englisshe tonge...." Lydgate and Occleve, the most noted poets of the period, invariably refer to him as their master.

As has already been mentioned, a large number of poems were written in close imitation of his style, and echoes of his verse are to be heard on every side.

It is usual to divide his followers into two groups: English Chaucerians and Scottish Chaucerians.

The English Chaucerians, with all their admiration for their master, show but scant understanding of his real greatness. Having little ear for rhythm themselves, they only mangle his verse when they try to imitate it; and while they fully recognise the debt which English versification owes him, it is but rarely that their own lines show any hint of his sweetness and melody. Lydgate is by far the greatest of them, and of him Professor Saintsbury justly remarks: "It is enough to say that, even in rime royal, his lines wander from seven to fourteen syllables, without the possibility of allowing monosyllabic or trisyllabic feet in any fashion that shall restore the rhythm; and that his couplets, as in the Story of Thebes itself, seem often to be unaware whether they are themselves octosyllabic or decasyllabic-four-footed, or five-footed." Instead of the suppleness and endless variety of Chaucer's verse, we have a treatment of metre which at its best is apt to be dull and stiff, and at its worst is intolerably slipshod. Only by some rare chance does a momentary gleam of beauty flicker across these pages, and a flash of poetic feeling raise the trite and conventional language to such a level as:-

O thoughtful herte, plonged in dystresse,

With slomber of slouthe this longe winter's night-

Out of the slepe of mortal hevinesse

Awake anon! and loke upon the light

Of thilke starr.

(Lydgate, Life of Our Lady.)

Nor is the matter much more inspiring than the form that clothes it. The English Chaucerians are worthy men, who spend their time in bewailing the errors of their youth and offering good advice to whoso will accept it. Of Chaucer's humour and realism they have no conception, nor do they realise the force of his digressions. The allegorical form of his earlier poems appeals to them, and, disregarding the movement and life of the Canterbury Tales, they ramble along the paths marked out in the Hous of Fame without attending to their master's excellent advice to flee prolixity. Lydgate, it is true, does show some narrative power. His Troy Book is obviously inspired by Troilus and Creseyde, and his Story of Thebes by the Knightes Tale, but he has neither the conciseness of Gower nor the dramatic insight of Chaucer. Among the 114 works attributed to him, it is only natural that some variety should be shown, and occasionally, as in the London Lickpenny, a skit on contemporary life in the City, he shows some trace of humour. The Temple of Glas is a close imitation of the Hous of Fame, but it lacks the shrewd sense, the original comments on life, the subtle humour of its model. Lydgate is most poetical when his religious feeling is touched, as in his Life of Our Lady; and most human when he becomes frankly autobiographical. The stiffness of the Temple of Glas is redeemed by such passages as that in which the author (who entered a monastery at fifteen) describes the lamentations of those

That were constrayned in hir tender youthe

And in childhode, as it is ofte couthe[208]

Yentered were into religion[209]

Or they hade yeares of discresioun;

That al her life cannot but complein

In wide copes perfeccion to feine.

Occleve, who has even less poetic genius than Lydgate, is remembered chiefly because the manuscript of his Gouvernail of Princes (a poem of good advice, addressed to Prince Hal) contains the only authentic portrait of Chaucer-a sketch drawn in the margin by the author himself. The lines which accompany the portrait, sufficiently illustrate the estimation in which Chaucer was held. Their modesty and simple affection disarm criticism.

Symple is my goste, and scars my letterure[210]

Unto youre excellence for to write

My inward love, and yit in aventure

Wol I me put, thogh I can but lyte;

My dere maister-God his soule quyte,-[211]

And fader, Chaucer, fayne wold have me taught,

But I was dulle, and lerned lyte or naught.

Allas! my worthy maister honorable,

This londes verray tresour and richesse,

Dethe by thy dethe hath harm irreperable

Unto us done: hir vengeable duresse[212]

Dispoiled hath this londe of the swetnesse

Of rethoryk, for unto Tullius

Was never man so lyk amenges us.

······

She myght have taryed hir vengeaunce a whyle,

Tyl sum man hadde egal to thee be;

Nay, let be that; she wel knew that this yle[213]

May never man forth bringe like to thee,

And her office needes do must she;

God bad her soo, I truste as for the beste,

O maystir, maystir, God thy soule reste!

His consciousness of the superiority of his master did not, however, prevent him from venturing to make use of the same material, and in the Chaste Spouse of the Emperor Gerelaus he re-tells the story of Constance.

A number of minor poets make up the list. Benedict Burgh-the shadow of Chaucer's shadow-completed The Secrets of the Philosophers, a peculiarly dull poem which Lydgate left unfinished at his death. Side by side with him worked George Ashby, clerk of the signet to Queen Margaret, and a little later comes Henry Bradshaw, a monk of St. Werburgh's Abbey at Chester. They are all worthy, honest men, who utter moral platitudes with an air of conviction; painstaking but unskilful apprentices in the workshop of poetry, who conscientiously blunt their tools and cut their fingers in a vain effort to do the work of master craftsmen. One curious little development is, however, worth noticing. In the latter half of the fifteenth century two poets, Sir George Ripley and Thomas Norton, wrote treatises on alchemy, in verse. Ripley's The Compound of Alchemy, or the Twelve Gates, and Norton's Ordinall of Alchemy, owe their interest in the first place to the proof they afford that verse at the time was a natural means of instruction rather than an end in itself; and in the second to their adventitious connection with the Chanouns Yemannes Tale. Norton endeavours to copy the Chaucerian couplet, and Professor Saintsbury suggests that he is probably the Th. Norton whom Ascham, in his Scholemaster, classes with Chaucer, Surrey, Wyatt and Phaer, as having vainly attempted to replace accent by rhyme.

Stephen Hawes falls into a class somewhat apart. Writing at the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, he stands at the parting of the ways, and while his poetry shows signs of the new influences that were at work, his heart is evidently with the old conventions which are beginning to pass away. His chief poem, The Pastime of Pleasure, or the Historye of Graunde Amoure and la Bell Pucell: containing the Knowledge of the Seven Sciences and the Course of Man's Life in this World, is sufficiently described by its title. It stands, as it were, half-way between Chaucer and Spenser, at one moment clearly recalling the love scenes of Troilus and Criseyde, at another reminding us equally forcibly of the elaborate and ingenious allegory of the Faerie Queene. The combination of chivalry and allegory was something new, and though Hawes himself proved incapable of making the most of its possibilities, English literature owes him a real debt. He never rises to any great height. Mr. Murison, in his chapter on Hawes in Vol. II of the Cambridge History of Literature, draws attention to certain verbal resemblances between the Passetyme of Pleasure and the Faerie Queene, but the passages quoted serve only to show how far removed the music of Spenser is from the speech of ordinary men. At his worst Hawes sinks beneath the lowest level of what can possibly be allowed to pass as verse. The dialogue between Graunde Amour and Dame Grammar defies parody:-

"Madame," quod I, "for as much as there be

Eight partes of speche, I would knowe right faine,

What a noune substantive is in his degree;

And wherefore it is so called certaine?

To whom she answered right gentely againe

Saing alway that a noune substantive

Might stand without helpe of an adjective.

That the stanza of Troilus and Criseyde should be used for such stuff as this is unbearable.

The Scottish Chaucerians are of far more intrinsic importance. The love-allegory of the Kingis Quair shows the influence of Chaucer not only in its use of the Chaucerian stanza-henceforth to be known as the rhyme royal-but in the evidence it affords of its author's acquaintance with the English version of the Romance of the Rose. Moreover, in it may be noticed that sympathy with the freshness and joy of nature which forms so strong a bond between Chaucer and his Scottish disciples, and is so conspicuous by its absence in the work of the English Chaucerians. Emily herself might well walk in the garden where

... on the smale grene twistis[214] sat

The little sweete nyghtingale, and song

So loud and clear, the hymnes consecrate

Of loves use, now softe now loud among,

That all the gard(e)nes and the walles rong

Ryght of their song, and on the copill[215] next

Of their sweet harmony, and lo the text:

"Worschippe, ye that loveres be(ne) this May,

For of your bliss the kalendes are begonne,

And sing with us, away winter, away,

Come sumer, come, the sweet season and sonne,

Awake, for schame! that have your heavenes wonne,

And amourously lift up your heades all,

Thank Love that list you to his merci call;"

and the picture of Joan Beaufort,

The fairest or the freschest yong(e) floure

That ever I sawe, me thoght, before that houre;

has something of Chaucer's daintiness and grace.

The Scottish poets have, also, far more sense of form than the English. Henryson's Testament of Cressid, written to satisfy its author's thirst for poetic justice and to show Cressida paying the penalty of her misdeeds, with all its conventional morality, for sincerity of feeling and felicity of style will bear comparison with its great original. His fables show a quick sense of humour, a combination of tenderness and realism which recall Chaucer again and again. The feast spread by the Burgis Mouse for the Uplandis Mouse is delightful:-

After when they disposed were to dine,

Withouten grace they wash'd and went to meat,

With all the courses that cooks could define,

Mutton and beef laid out in slices greet;

And lordis fare thus could they counterfeit,

Except one thing, they drank the water clear

Instead of wine, but yet they made good cheer.

Gawain Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, was perhaps most nearly akin to the English Chaucerians. A scholar and a man of distinguished position, he has none of the lightness of Henryson. He takes poetry seriously, and inclines to trace a moral purpose even in the ?neid. His Palice of Honour well illustrates the manner in which Chaucer's successors made free with the framework of his poems, while at the same time it shows the growing delight in picturesque effect which was one day to break into the Elizabethan glow of colour. The poet finds himself wandering in a dreary wilderness and breaks out in complaint against Fortune, who has led him there. As he laments, he sees approaching him a rout "of ladyis fair and gudlie men":-

Amiddes(t) whom borne in a golden chair

O'er-fret with pearl and stones most preclair[216]

That draw(e)n was by hackneys all milk-white

Was set a Queen, as lily sweet of swair[217]

In purple robe, hemmed with gems each gair[218]

Which gemmed claspes closed all perfite[219]

A diadem, most pleasantly polite,

Set on the tresses of her golden hair.

The original form, which illustrates the comparatively modernness of the language used by Chaucer, is as follows:

Amiddes quhome, borne in ane goldin chair

Ourfret with perle and stanis maist preclair

That drawin was by haiknayis all milk quhite,

Was set a Quene, as lyllie sweit of swair

In purpor rob hemmit with gold ilk gair,

Quhilk gemmit claspis closit all perfite.

A diademe maist plesandlie polite.

Set on the tressis of her giltin hair.

And in her hand a scepter of delight.

This is Dame Sapyence, and with her come Diana, Jephtha's daughter, Palamon, Arcite and Emily, Troilus and Cressida, David and Bathsheba, Delilah, Cleopatra, Jacob and Rachel, Venus (whose "hair as gold or topasis was hewit") and a number more famous lovers of antiquity. A "ballet of inconstant love" follows. This offends Venus, and the poet is brought before her to answer for his lack of respect. Poetry, the Muses, and the Poets from Homer to Chaucer and Dunbar, form a Court. Calliope pleads for him, and he is allowed to atone for his misdeed by composing "A ballet for Venus' pleasour," which so delights the company that he is invited to join the cavalcade. After travelling through Germany, France, Italy, and other countries, they reach the Fountain of the Muses. Here they alight:-

Our horses pastured in ain pleasand plane,

Low at the foot of ain fair grene montane,

Amid ain mead shaddowit with cedar trees,

where

... beriall stremis rinnand ouir stanerie greis[220]

Made sober noise, the shaw dinned agane

For birdis song and sounding of the beis.[221]

In the midst of the field Douglas finds a gorgeous pavilion in which knights and ladies are feasting, while a poet relates the brave deeds of those who in the past proved "maist worthie of thair handis." After listening to these heroic tales the company once more sets out. Beyond Damascus they reach their journey's end. The poet is guided by a nymph to the foot of a steep mountain, at the summit of which stands the Palace of Honour. As he climbs he sees before him a dreadful abyss out of which proceed flames. His ears are filled with the sound of terrible cries; on either side lie dead bodies. These beings in torment are they who set out to pursue Honour, but "fell on sleuthfull sleip," and so were "drownit in the loch of cair." (It has been suggested by critics bent on finding an original for the Pilgrim's Progress, that Bunyan found in this the idea of his "byway to Hell.") At last he reaches the Palace, where he is shown many treasures, including Venus' mirror, which reflects "the deidis and fatis of euerie eirdlie wicht." Prince Honour is attended by all the virtues, and the poem ends by contrasting worldly and heavenly honour and commending virtue.

The gracious figure of Sapience, her dress gleaming with jewels, her head crowned with a diadem, is very different from any being of Lydgate's or Occleve's creation; already the first rays of Renaissance light are showing above the horizon, and the cold gray mists of fifteenth-century poetry are dispersing before its warmth and brilliance; but the radiance that heralds the new era is that of sunrise, flushing the world with a wonder of colour, rather than of that light of common day in which Chaucer is content to walk. In the great age to come, the Elizabethans are to show how the rapture and intoxication of beauty may be combined with the sternest realism, but in the early sixteenth century the children of the new birth walk with uncertain steps towards the dawn.

The poet who most clearly shows the growing love of beauty, and at the same time is most truly in sympathy with Chaucer, is William Dunbar. No other poet of the period has such skill in versification, such freshness and vigour, or such variety. His humour is as all-pervading as Chaucer's. Now he addresses a daring poem to King James, slyly laughing at one of his numerous love affairs; now he writes the story of the Two Friars of Berwick, or the Treatise of the Two Married Women and the Widow, broadly comic fabliaux which might well have found a place among the Canterbury Tales. One of the wittiest of his poems is the Visitation of St. Francis, in which the poet describes how his patron saint appeared to him in a dream, bidding him wear the habit of a friar. Dunbar answers slyly that he has noticed more bishops than friars are among the saints, so perhaps it will be as well if St. Francis, to make all sure, provides him with a bishop's robes instead, and then he is sure to go to heaven. Whereupon his visitant reveals himself in his true character and vanishes in a cloud of brimstone. Two little lyrics on James Dog, Keeper of the Queen's wardrobe, are very characteristic. In the first, "whan that he had offendit him," each verse ends with the refrain:-

Madame, ye have a dangerous Dog;

in the second, when the quarrel had been made up, the refrain runs:-

He is na Dog: he is a Lamb.

As Mr. Gregory Smith points out, "Dunbar is unlike Henryson in lacking the gentler and more intimate fun of their master. He is a satirist in the stronger sense; more boisterous in his fun, and showing, in his wildest frolics, an imaginative range which has no counterpart in the southern poet"; but his sincerity and virility, his boyish sense of fun, remind us of Chaucer again and again. The Reve would thoroughly have enjoyed telling the story of the flying friar of Tungland who courted disaster by using hen's feathers. Chaucerian, too, in the truest sense, is Dunbar's power of combining this keen sense of the ridiculous with a no less keen appreciation of beauty. The charm of his verse is incontestible, and his skill in making effective use of burdens and refrains shows an ear sensitive to music. The Thistle and the Rose, written in honour of the marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor, borrows its idea from the Parlement of Foules, and has something of Chaucer's tenderness and charm. Dame Nature commands all birds, beasts, and flowers to appear before her, and after some debate proceeds to crown the thistle with rubies, while the birds unite in singing the praises of the "freshe Rose of colour red and white."

The Golden Targe, an allegorical poem of the conventional type, in which the shield of Reason proves no defence against the arrows of Beauty, contains a description of spring which Chaucer himself never equalled:-

Full angel-like the birdes sang their houres

Within their curtains green, into their boweres

Apparelled white and red with blossoms sweet;

Enamelled was the field with all coloures

The pearly dropes shook in silver showeres

While all in balm did branch and leaves flete[222]

To part from Ph?bus did Aurora weep;

Her crystal tears I saw hang on the floweres

Which he for love all drank up with his heat.

·······

For mirth of May with skippes and with hoppes

The birdes sang upon the tender croppes[223]

With curious notes as Venus chapell clerkes;

The rose yong, new spreding of her knoppes[224]

War powdered bright with hevenly beriall[225] droppes

Through beames red, burning as ruby sparkes

The skyes rang for shouting of the larkes.

And in addition to all these, Dunbar writes serious religious poetry on such subjects as Love, Earthly and Divine, draws a by no means unimpressive picture of the Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, and in his Lament for the Makaris (poets), with its haunting refrain:-

Timor Mortis conturbat me

shows a sense of the transitoriness of all earthly pleasure.

Enough has already been said to show that the influences that moulded sixteenth-century literature in England were not such as to lead its poets to model themselves on Chaucer. In the Golden Targe, Dunbar gives expression to the popular view of Chaucer in his day:-

O reverend Chaucer, rose of rethoris[226] all,

As in our tongue a flower imperial,

That rose in Britain ever, who readeth right,

Thou bear'st, of makers[227] the triumph royal;

Thy fresh enamelled termes celestial

This matter could illumined have full bright,

Wert thou not of our English all the light,

Surmounting every tongue terrestrial

As far as Mayes morrow doth midnight?

And here again, as in Occleve, we see that it is for his language rather than for his invention that the poet is praised. But the sixteenth century saw the change from Middle English to Modern, a change which, for the time being, lost men the key to Chaucer's verse. Old inflections had gradually dropped off, the accented "e" which ends so many of Chaucer's words had become mute, and the result was that the poets of the new age found Chaucer's lines impossible to scan. A generation whose taste was formed on Classical and Italian models, whose precisians urged the necessity of discarding "bald and beggarly rhymning" in favour of the classical system of accent, had not patience enough to rediscover the laws that governed Chaucer's verse. It says much for the insight and genuine poetic taste of Elizabethan critics that they one and all speak of Chaucer with admiration and respect. Fresh editions of his works continued to appear at frequent intervals throughout the century, and frequent references to his name show that they were well known to the poets of the period. To Spenser he is "The God of shepheards":-

Who taught me homely, as I can, to make.

He, whilst he lived, was the soueraigne head

Of shepheards all, that been with loue ytake;

and he goes on to protest that

... all hys passing skil with him is fledde,

The fame whereof doth dayly greater growe.

The famous reference in the Faerie Queene to

Dan Chaucer, well of Englishe undefyled,

On Fames eternal beadroll worthie to be fyled,

has become part of the Chaucerian critic's stock in trade, and is as apt and as well-known as Dryden's phrase which speaks of Chaucer as "a perpetual fountain of good sense." Book III, canto xxv of the Faerie Queene contains a paraphrase of some of the lines on true love in the Frankleyns Tale, and Book IV boldly promises to continue the story of

Couragious Cambell, and stout Triamond,

With Canacee and Cambine linckt in lovely bond.

Whether the Spenserian stanza is a modification of the rhyme royal or of the stanza used by Boccaccio and Ariosto it is impossible to say-all three are obviously related to each other-but in view of Spenser's admiration for Chaucer, and his deliberate attempt to use "Chaucerisms," it is at least probable that in this respect the Faerie Queene owes a debt to Troilus and Criseyde. In Mother Hubbard's Tale and Colin Clouts come home again, Spenser is frankly, though unsuccessfully, imitating Chaucer's style. William Browne, the poet of Tavistock, also showed his admiration for Chaucer by an attempt to imitate him in his Shepheard's Pipe, a series of eclogues modelled partly on the Shepherd's Calendar and partly on the Canterbury Tales. In the concluding lines of the first eclogue, which contains the story of Jonathas, Browne confesses his indebtedness to Occleve:-

Scholler unto Tityrus

Tityrus the bravest swaine

Ever lived on plaine ...

thus using for Chaucer the name bestowed on him by Spenser.

During the seventeenth century Chaucer's fame seems to have suffered a temporary eclipse. Between 1602 and 1687 not a single edition of his works appeared, and the edition of 1687 is in reality no more than a re-issue of Speght's. The poets hardly mention his name. Milton does indeed make a reference to the Squieres Tale, but his works show no trace of Chaucer's influence. Towards the end of the century, however, there was a revival of interest. Dryden tells us that Mr. Cowley declared he had no taste of him, but my lord of Leicester, on the other hand, was so warm an admirer of the Canterbury Tales that he thought it "little less than profanation and sacrilege" to modernise their language, and not until his death did Dryden venture to turn into modern English the tales of the Knight, the Nun's Priest, and the Wife of Bath, and the character of the poor Parson in the Prologue. The wigs and ruffles of the seventeenth century, however, suit but ill the sturdy figure of the fourteenth-century poet. We stand aghast before Dryden's Arcite, who, in the throes of death, exclaims:-

No language can express the smallest part

Of what I feel, and suffer in my heart,

······

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.

It is an excellent specimen of the poetry of 1699, but it is not Chaucer.

Dryden is, indeed, far more eighteenth than seventeenth century in feeling, and while the authors of the eighteenth century are too really great not to appreciate true poetry wherever they see it, their own taste leads them to the erection of "neat Modern buildings" rather than to the admiration of "an ancient majestick piece of Gothick Architecture," and all attempts to combine the two must necessarily be foredoomed to failure. Pope paraphrases the Hous of Fame; Prior writes Two Imitations of Chaucer, viz. Susanah and the Two Elders, and Earl Robert's Mice; Gay writes a comedy on the Wife of Bath, with Chaucer himself for hero; the Rev. Thomas Warton, who, as professor of poetry at Oxford, ought to have known better, writes an elegy on the death of Pope in an extraordinary jargon which he apparently considers Chaucerian English. (See Miss Spurgeon's Chaucer devant la Critique, pp. 62-75.) But while these, and numerous other works of the same kind, prove that Chaucer was widely read at the time, they afford no evidence at all of his having any direct influence upon the general development of eighteenth-century poetry. His place as an English classic is firmly established, but centuries have passed since he wrote, and the point of view of the men of the new age differs too widely from that of their forefathers for any imitation to be possible, except by way of a conscious experiment. The most amazing of all modernisations was that of 1841. Richard Hengist Horne, inspired, if we may believe his own words, by no less a person than Wordsworth, hit on the most unfortunate idea of issuing Chaucer's poems in two volumes done into modern English by a sort of joint-stock company of contemporary poets. Wordsworth himself, Leigh Hunt, Miss Barrett, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Bulwer-Lytton and the Cowden Clarkes, were to be among the contributors. Landor showed his usual common-sense by refusing to take any part in it, and his letter to Horne on the subject is worth quoting: "Indeed I do admire him (Chaucer), or rather, love him.... Pardon me if I say that I would rather see Chaucer quite alone, in the dew of his sunny morning, than with twenty clever gentlefolks about him, arranging his shoestrings and buttoning his doublet. I like even his language. I will have no hand in breaking his dun but rich-painted glass to put in (if clearer) much thinner panes." It is comforting to reflect that the first volume proved a failure, and the second never saw the light.

Fortunately the labours of such scholars as Professor Skeat and Dr. Furnivall have saved us from all fear of being left in future to the tender mercies of the moderniser. However great may be the changes that are to pass over our language, however strange the tongue of fourteenth-century England may sound in the ears of our descendants, Chaucer's English has been preserved once for all, and never again can we lose the key to his world of harmony and delight.

In Chaucer I am sped

His tales I have red;

His mater is delectable

Solacious and commendable;

His english wel alowed,

So as it enprowed,[228]

For as it is enployed

There is no englyshe voyd-

At those days moch commended,

And now men wold haue amended

His englishe where-at they barke,

And marre all they warke;

Chaucer, that famous Clarke

His tearmes were not darcke,

But pleasunt, easy, and playne;

No worde he wrote in vayne.

(Skelton, introductory lines to the Book of Phillip sparow, 1507?)

* * *

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Skeat. Chaucer, text and notes, seven volumes (Clarendon Press, 1894).

W. P. Ker. English Literature: Medieval. "Home University Library" (Williams & Norgate, 1913).

Ten Brink. History of English Literature, vol. ii, pp. 33-199. Translated by W. Clarke Robinson, Ph.D. (George Bell & Sons, 1901).

Ten Brink. Language and Metre of Chaucer, translated by M. Bentinck Smith (Macmillan & Co., 1901).

Lounsbury. Studies in Chaucer, his Life and Writings (James R. Osgood McIlvaine & Co., 1892).

G. C. Coulton. Chaucer and his England (Methuen, 2nd ed. 1909).

Dryden. Preface to the Fables. Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker, vol. ii, pp. 246-273 (Clarendon Press, 1900).

Transactions of the Chaucer Society (Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co.).

A. W. Ward. Chaucer. "English Men of Letters."

Cambridge History of Literature, vol. ii (Cambridge University Press, 1908).

Schofield. English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer (Macmillan & Co., 1906).

G. E. & W. H. Hadow. Oxford Treasury of English Literature, vol. i (Clarendon Press, 1905).

GERMAN AND FRENCH WORKS

Ten Brink. Chaucer Studien (Trübner, 1870).

Legouis. Geoffroy Chaucer (Bloud et Cie., 1910) (Eng. tr. Lailavoix. Dent, 1912).

Spurgeon. Chaucer devant la critique (Hachette et Cie., 1911).

* * *

INDEX

A.B.C., Chaucer's, 42, 48

Against Women Unconstant, 41

Anelida and Arcite, 46

An Amorous Compleint, 41, 46

Ashby George, 234

Boccaccio, 19, 20, 39, 49, 51, 63, 69, 73, 76, 77, 248

Bo?thius's Consolations of Philosophy, 47, 50

Book of the Duchesse, the, 12, 16, 40, 43-6, 47, 49, 50, 62, 64, 106, 130-2, 171, 179, 183, 190, 194, 227

Bradshaw, Henry, 234

Browne, William, 249

Burgh, Benedict, 234

Cambridge History of Literature, the, 42, 237

Canterbury Tales, the, 46, 49, 62, 67, 83, 107, 117-29, 136-41, 150, 157, 185, 213, 214, 222-3, 231

Chanouns Yemannes Tale, 223-6

Chaucer, Agnes, 13

-- Apocrypha, 67-8

--, Elizabeth, 18

--, Geoffrey, birth, 7;

education, 9-14;

marriage, 15-18;

public life, 18-30;

death, 31

--, John, 8, 13, 23

--, Lewis, 17, 67

Chaucer's Originals and Analogues, 84, 99

Chaucer, Philippa, 15-17

--, Thomas, 17, 18

Clarence, Lionel, Duke of, 13

Clerkes Tale, 16, 19, 46, 125, 133, 134, 215

Compleint of Mars, 50, 156

Compleint to his Lady, 40

Compleinte unto Pitè, 40, 46

Coulton, G. C., Chaucer and his England, 18, 20

Court of Love, the, 10

Dante, 19, 20, 48, 50, 54, 101, 102, 103

Deguileville, Guillaume de, 42, 44

Douglas, Gawain, 12;

influence of Chaucer on, 238-42

Dunbar, 242-6

Dryden, John, 248, 249, 250

Fielding, 157

Frankeleyns Tale, 128, 129, 134, 192, 210, 248

Freres Tale, 197, 210

Furnivall, Dr., 99, 252

Gascoigne, 17

Gaunt, John of, 15, 18, 21, 25, 43, 50, 201, 206

Gower, John, 22, 37, 209

Hawes, Stephen, 235-6

Hendyng, Proverbs of, 35, 36

Henryson, 238-9, 244

House of Fame, the, 16, 21, 53-62, 128, 153, 155, 156, 188, 209, 232, 251

Jonson, Ben, 155

Ker, W. P., 32, 40

Kingis Quair, the, 236-7

Knightes Tale, 46, 73-6, 83, 128, 132, 180, 181, 182, 229

Lak of Stedfastnesse, 216

Landor, Walter Savage, 252

Layamon, 32, 36

Legend of Good Women, the, 11, 21, 25, 42, 62, 63-7, 106, 191, 206, 216

Leland, 10, 14

Lenvoy a Scogan, 24

Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton, 16, 125

Lounsbury, 10

Lydgate, Portrait of medi?val schoolboy, 9;

versification, 47, 54;

Temple of Glas, 62;

influence of Chaucer on, 229-32, 242

Lyf of St. Cecyle, 46, 48, 64

Machault, Guillaume de, 39, 67

Man of Lawes Tale, 47, 85-97, 136, 205, 210, 219, 226

Marchantes Tale, 15, 126

Maunciples Tale, 198, 210

Merciles Beaute, 40

Milleres Tale, 148, 149, 186-7

Milton, 249

Monkes Tale, 48, 100-2

Nonne Preestes Tale, 84, 94, 97-100, 140, 141, 153, 154, 170, 187-8, 208

Norton, Thomas, 234

Occleve, 229-34, 242, 249

Of the Wretched Engendering of Mankind, 46, 48, 93

Palamon and Arcite, 46, 49, 64

Pardoners Tale, 8, 9, 157-65

Parlement of Foules, the, 16, 17, 40, 49, 50-3, 62, 64, 69, 106, 165, 189, 193, 194, 195, 244

Persones Tale, 217

Petrarch, 19, 20, 49

Phisiciens Tale, 135

Piers Plowman, 33, 38, 211-12

Pope, Alexander, 251

Prioresses Tale, 202-4

Retters, 14

Ripley, Sir George, 234

Rolle, Richard, 33

Romance of the Rose, the, 41, 63, 70, 206, 237

Romances, English metrical, 34, 70-2, 148, 175

Saintsbury, 42, 230

Seconde Nonnes Tale, 46, 48, 135

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 78;

Othello, 104, 122, 127, 132, 146, 147, 148, 152

Sir Thopas, 82-3, 156

Skeat, introductory note, vi, 24, 30, 38, 48, 54, 83, 252

Skelton, quotation from, 253

Snell, Age of Chaucer, 8

Somnours Tale, 170, 210

Speght, 10, 249

Spenser, 181, 182, 188-9, 195, 235-6, 247, 248, 249

Squieres Tale, 79-82, 133, 165, 178, 191

Swift, 155

Ten Brink, History of English Literature, 30, 40, 43, 49, 201

The Tale of the Wyf of Bathe, 138-9, 182, 218

To Rosemounde, 41

Treatise on the Astrolabe, 67, 221-2

Trivet, Nicholas, 84 (note), 85, 96, 97

Troilus and Criseyde, 20, 41, 47, 49, 62, 65, 76-9, 82, 103, 106-17, 118, 136, 137, 165, 179, 184, 185, 196, 207, 208-9, 211, 231, 236

Truth, ballade of, 31

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In Preparation

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A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. By Clement Webb, M.A.

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POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From Bentham to J. S. Mill. By Prof. W. L. Davidson.

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Footnotes:

[1] So that I gained but little.

[2] chidden by.

[3] faults.

[4]

There are but three histories to which any man will listen,

Of France, and of Britain and of Rome the Great.

[5] And had the corpse (i. e. Antony's) embalmed.

[6] And forth she fetched this dead corpse, and shut it in the shrine.

[7] sterte, sprang.

[8] God knows.

[9] contradicted.

[10] knows.

[11] or else something similar.

[12] fools.

[13] I had the thing I did not want.

[14] How he pays folk what he owes them.

[15]

No pike ever so wallowed in a galantine

As I wallow and am entangled in love.

[16]

Francis Petrarch, the laureat poet,

This clerk was called, whose rhetoric sweet

Illumined all Italy with poetry.

[17] Till fully dazed is thy look.

[18] The box in which dead bodies are put.

[19] Suitable for pipes.

[20] Evergreen oak.

[21] Tall fir.

[22] Cypress which mourns for death, i. e. is often found in churchyards.

[23] Yew-tree, of which bows are made.

[24] Aspen, suitable for making arrows.

[25] With cheerfulness.

[26] Here is no home.

[27] Keep to the highway, and let thy spirit lead thee.

[28] And there is no fear but that truth shall deliver (thee).

[29] scarcely.

[30] thus.

[31] head.

[32] death.

The passage is taken from Richard Rolle of Hampole's Pricke of Conscience (Morris and Skeat, Specimens of Early English, Part II, p. 108).

[33] For a comparison of the French with the English romances see Professor Ker's volume on Medieval Literature in this series, pp. 66-74.

[34] like me.

[35] obtained aught.

[36]

He was pale as a stone ball, in a palsy he seemed,

And clothed in rough cloth, I do not know how to describe it;

In an under-jacket and short coat, and a knife by his side;

The sleeves were like those of a friar's habit.

Piers Plowman, V. 78-81.

[37] A pity.

[38] meadow.

[39] i. e. companion to another.

[40] of the most graceful shape.

[41] plowed.

[42] Thou art hard to carry.

[43] ignorant.

[44] tellers of tales or gestes.

[45] trumpet.

[46] journeys.

[47] delay.

[48] before he uttered a sound.

[49] many an hymn for your holy-days.

[50] will make fire dim.

[51] curled locks.

[52] embroidered.

[53] playing the flute.

[54] fine flour.

[55] complexion.

[56] worthless.

[57] The translations are taken from Chaucer's Originals and Analogues, published by the Chaucer Society.

[58] This unusual list of the seven sciences is that given by Trivet.

[59] barbarous nation.

[60] died.

[61] commands.

[62] no matter if I am lost.

[63] grieve us but a little.

[64] sprinkled.

[65] All our joy ends in woe.

[66] maid.

[67] have pity on.

[68] rueful being.

[69] my love has gone away.

[70] eyes.

[71] Have the Greeks thus soon made you thin?

[72] Carving-tools.

[73] Slumberest thou as if in a lethargy.

[74] Friends cannot always be together.

[75] I am glad (lit. it is dear to me).

[76] And without doubt, to ease your heart.

[77] almost died for fear.

[78] the most timid person.

[79] pain.

[80] mine.

[81] be wroth with.

[82] cherish.

[83] sighed.

[84] i. e. I must act cautiously.

[85] jeopardy.

[86] No matter for the jangling of wicked tongues.

[87] blame.

[88] i. e. my name will be in everyone's mouth.

[89] penitent.

[90] lap.

[91] bless.

[92] do reverence, bow.

[93] wreak, avenge.

[94] chain.

[95] toil.

[96] desires.

[97] seems good to her.

[98] glitters.

[99] i. e. as my brains tell me.

[100] simply by nature.

[101] i. e. an unpropitious conjunction of planets.

[102] i. e. change of disposition.

[103] Wallacia.

[104] Possibly this refers to the sea of sand and pebbles mentioned by Sir John Mandeville in his Travels. To go bareheaded was considered a great hardship.

[105] Probably the dangerous gulf of Quarnaro in the Adriatic.

[106] hear tell.

[107] Where there was likely to be foolish behaviour.

[108]

Let them be bread of pure wheat-flour,

And let us wives be called barley-bread.

[109] burned.

[110]

With scrips cramful of lies

Intermixed with news.

[111] bel ami, fair friend.

[112] jests.

[113] ribaldry.

[114] learn.

[115] take trouble to speak loudly.

[116] i. e. I have all my sermon by heart.

[117] Wherewith to colour my sermon.

[118] If their souls go blackberrying, i. e. I do not care where they go.

[119] i. e. curate of the parish.

[120] practised folly.

[121] kill.

[122] bees.

[123] And made guesses according to their fancy.

[124] The horse of Sinon the Greek.

[125] plot.

[126] whispered.

[127] ignorant.

[128] staff.

[129] ducks.

[130] kill.

[131] flew.

[132]

Groweth seed and bloweth mead

And springeth the wood now-

Sing cuckoo.

[133] goes.

[134] steady pace.

[135] maid.

[136] together.

[137] fall quickly from the linden tree.

[138] What need is there to tell of their array?

[139] i. e. Let us pay no attention to their greetings.

[140] fell to hunting.

[141] hot-foot.

[142] notes on the horn.

[143] roused itself.

[144] together.

[145] thrust.

[146] grave.

[147] size.

[148] Or looked well.

[149] Why should I be tedious.

[150] condition.

[151] bright.

[152] That steamed like a furnace of lead.

[153] condition.

[154] slim.

[155] girdle.

[156] apron.

[157] strings of her white cap.

[158] matched her collar.

[159] enticing eye.

[160] her eyebrows were fine.

[161] And they were arched, and black as any sloe.

[162] A kind of early pear.

[163] studded with brass.

[164] puppet.

[165] brisk.

[166] a sweet drink.

[167] mead.

[168] To have more flowers than the seven stars in the sky.

[169] This refers to the common practice of paying a poor and often illiterate priest to take charge of a parish while the vicar went to London and earned a handsome and easy livelihood by saying masses for the repose of the souls of those who had left rich relatives.

[170] He was loth to excommunicate those whose tithe was in arrears.

[171] i. e. sow tares in our wheat.

[172] chorister.

[173] know.

[174] God grant that we may meet.

[175] Was eaten by the lion ere he could escape.

[176] slain.

[177] drowning.

[178] doctors.

[179] temperament.

[180] gluttony.

[181] dreamers.

[182] fiend.

[183] died and rose.

[184] wholly.

[185] servants.

[186] fairs.

[187] market.

[188] breaketh down my barn door.

[189] I scarcely dare look round, on account of him.

[190] tipped.

[191] guild-hall.

[192] da?s.

[193] suitable.

[194] Service held on the vigils of Saints' Days.

[195] The name Langland is used for convenience sake, to denote the author, or authors of Piers Plowman.

[196] his own labour.

[197] unstable.

[198] chatter.

[199] dear at a Jane, i. e. a small Genoese coin.

[200] Your judgment is false, your constancy proves evil.

[201] i. e. one who farms taxes.

[202] pierced and cut into points.

[203] in secret and openly.

[204] birth.

[205] do not care a farthing.

[206] fetched.

[207] known.

[208] known.

[209] Entered were into religion, i. e. were placed in a monastery.

[210] Simple is my mind, and little my learning.

[211] repay.

[212] revengeful cruelty.

[213] isle.

[214] twigs.

[215] stanza.

[216] precious.

[217] neck.

[218] gore.

[219] perfect.

[220] grey stones.

[221] bees.

[222] float.

[223] tree-tops.

[224] buds.

[225] drops clear as beryl.

[226] flower of all rhetoricians.

[227] poets.

[228] proved.

* * *

Transcriber's Notes:

Punctuation has been corrected without note.

Other than the corrections noted by hover information, inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original.