CHAUCER. 227 



scratch his ass s head between the ears. When Titania, 

 queen of that fair ideal world, offers him a feast of beauty, 

 he says he has a good stomach to a pottle of hay ! 



The Anglo-Saxons never had any real literature of their 

 own. They produced monkish chronicles in bad Latin, and 

 legends of saints in worse metre. Their earlier poetry is 

 essentially Scandinavian. It was that gens inclytissima 

 Northmannorum that imported the divine power of imagina 

 tion that power which, mingled with the solid Saxon 

 understanding, produced at last the miracle of Stratford. 

 It was to this adventurous race, which found America 

 before Columbus, which, for the sake of freedom of thought, 

 could colonise inhospitable Iceland, which, as it were, 

 typifying the very action of the imaginative faculty itself, 

 identified itself always with what it conquered, that we owe 

 whatever aquiline features there are in the national 

 physiognomy of the English race. It was through the 

 Normans that the English mind and fancy, hitherto pro 

 vincial and uncouth, were first infused with the lightness, 

 grace, and self-confidence of Romance literature. They 

 seem to have opened a window to the southward in that 

 solid and somewhat sombre insular character, and it was a 

 painted window all aglow with the figures of tradition and 

 poetry. The old Gothic volume, grim with legends of 

 devilish temptation and satanic lore, they illuminated with 

 the gay and brilliant inventions of a softer climate and 

 more genial moods. Even the stories of Arthur and his 

 knights, toward which the stern Dante himself relented so 

 far as to call them gratissimas ambages most delightful 

 circumlocutions though of British origin, were first set 

 free from the dungeon of a barbarous dialect by the French 

 poets, and so brought back to England, and made popular 

 there by the Normans. 



Chaucer, to whom French must have been almost as truly 

 a mother tongue as English, was familiar with all that had 

 been done by Troubadour or Trouvere. In him we see the 

 first result of the Norman yeast upon the home-baked 

 Saxon loaf. The flour had been honest, the paste well 



