194 CHAUCER. 



* Know st thou ever a relic that is called Truth ? 



Couldst thou show us the way where that wight dwellcth?* 



Nay, so God help me, said the man then, 



I saw never palmer with staff nor with scrip 



Ask after him ever till now in this place. 



This is a good hit, and the poet is satisfied ; but, in what I am 

 going to quote from Chaucer, everything becomes picture, over 

 which lies broad and warm the sunshine of humorous fancy. 



In olde daye s of the King Artour 



Of which that Britouns speken gret honour, 



All was this lond fulfilled of fayerie : 



The elf-queen with her joly compaignie 



Danced ful oft in many a grene mede: 



This was the old opinion as I rede; 



I speke of many hundrid yer ago : 



But now can no man see none elves mo, 



For now the grete charite and prayeres 



Of lymytours and other holy freres 



That sechen every lond and every streem, 



As thick as motis in the sonnebeam, 



Blessyng halles, chambres, kitchenes, and bonrcs, 



Citees and burghes, castels hihe and toures, 



Thorpes and bernes, shepnes and dayeries, 



This makith that ther ben no fayeries. 



For ther as wont to walken was an elf 



There walkith none but the lymytour himself, 



In undermeles and in morwenynges, 



And sayth his matyns and his holy thinges, 



As he goth in his lymytatioun. 



Wommen may now go saufly up and doun : 



In every bush or under every tre 



There is none other incubus but he, 



And he ne wol doon hem no dishondur. 



How cunningly the contrast is suggested here between the Elf- 

 queen s jolly company and the unsocial limiters, thick as motes 

 in the sunbeam, yet each walking by himself ! And with what 

 an air of innocent unconsciousness is the deadly thrust of the 

 last verse given, with its contemptuous emphasis on the he that 

 seems so well-meaning ! Even Shakespeare, who seems to come 

 in after everybody has done his best with a Let me take hold a 

 minute and show you how to do it/ could not have bettered this. 

 Piers Ploughman is the best example I know of what is 

 called popular poetry of compositions, that is, which contain 

 all the simpler elements of poetry, but still in solution, not 

 crystallised around any thread of artistic purpose. In it appears 

 at her best the Anglo-Saxon Muse, a first cousin of Poor Richard, 

 full of proverbial wisdom, who always brings her knitting in her 

 pocket, and seems most at home in the chimney-corner. It is 

 genial ; it plants itself firmly on human nature with its rights 

 and wrongs ; it has a surly honesty, prefers the downright to 

 the gracious, and conceives of speech as a tool rather than a, 



