192 CHAUCER. 



at the middle or the end, dodge back to the beginning, the pa 

 tient old man is there to take you by the button and go on with 

 his imperturbable narrative. You may have left off with Cly- 

 temnestra, and you may begin again with Samson ; it makes no 

 odds, for you cannot tell one from t other. His tediousness is 

 omnipresent, and like Dogberry he could find in his heart to 

 bestow it all (and more if he had it) on your worship. The word 

 lengthy has been charged to our American account, but it must 

 have been invented by the first reader of Gower s works, the 

 only inspiration of which they were ever capable. Our literature 

 had to lie by and recruit for more than four centuries ere it could 

 give us an equal vacuity in Tupper, so persistent a uniformity of 

 commonplace in the Recreations of a Country Parson. Let us 

 be thankful that the industrious Gower never found time for 

 recreation ! 



But a fairer as well as more instructive comparison lies between 

 Chaucer and the author of Piers Ploughman. Langland has 

 as much tenderness, as much interest in the varied picture of 

 life, as hearty a contempt for hypocrisy, and almost an equal 

 sense of fun. He has the same easy abundance of matter. But 

 what a difference ! It is the difference between the poet and the 

 man of poetic temperament. The abundance of the one is a 

 continual fulness within the fixed limits of good taste ; that of 

 the other is squandered in overflow. The one can be profuse 

 on occasion ; the other is diffuse whether he will or no. The 

 one is full of talk ; the other is garrulous. What in one is the 

 refined bonhomie of a man of the world, is a rustic shrewdness 

 in the other. Both are kindly in their satire, and have not (like 

 too many reformers) that vindictive love of virtue which spreads 

 the stool of repentance with thistle-burrs before they invite the 

 erring to seat themselves therein. But what in * Piers Plough 

 man is sly fun, has the breadth and depth of humour in 

 Chaucer; and it is plain that while the former was taken up by 

 his moral purpose, the main interest of the latter turned to 

 perfecting the form of his work. In short, Chaucer had that 

 _fm literary sense which is as rare as genius, and, united with 

 it, as it was in him, assures an immortality of fame. It is not 

 merely what he has to say, but even more the agreeable way 

 he has of saying it, that captivates our attention and gives 

 him an assured place in literature. Above all, it is not in de 

 tached passages that his charm lies, but in the entirety of ex 

 pression and the cumulative effect of many particulars working 

 toward a common end. Now though ex ungue leoncm be 



