228 CHA UCER. 



kneaded, but the inspiring leaven was wanting till the 

 Norman brought it over. Chaucer works still in the solid 

 material of his race, but with what airy lightness has he not 

 infused it ? Without ceasing to be English, he has escaped 

 from being insular. But he was something more than this ; 

 he was a scholar, a thinker, and a critic. He had studied 

 the Divina Commedia of Dante, he had read Petrarca and 

 Boccaccio, and some of the Latin poets. He calls Dante 

 the great poet of Italy, and Petrarch a learned clerk. It is 

 plain that he knew very well the truer purpose of poetry, 

 and had even arrived at the higher wisdom of comprehend 

 ing the aptitudes and limitations of his own genius. He 

 saw clearly and felt keenly what were the faults and what 

 the wants of the prevailing literature of his country. In 

 the &quot; Monk s Tale &quot; he slily satirises the long-winded 

 morality of Gower, as his prose antitype Fielding was to 

 satirise the prolix sentimentality of E/ichardson. In the 

 rhyme of Sir Thopas he gives the coup de grace to the 

 romances of Chivalry, and in his own choice of a subject he 

 heralds that new world in which the actual and the popular 

 were to supplant the fantastic and the heroic. 



Before Chaucer, modern Europe had given birth to one 

 great poet, Dante; and contemporary with him was one 

 supremely elegant one, Petrarch. Dante died only seven 

 years before Chaucer was born, and, so far as culture is 

 derived from books, the moral and intellectual influences 

 they had been subjected to, the speculative stimulus that 

 may have given an impulse to their minds there could 

 have been no essential difference between them. Yet there 

 are certain points of resemblance and of contrast, and those 

 not entirely fanciful, which seem to me of considerable 

 interest. Both were of mixed race, Dante certainly, 

 Chaucer presumably so. Dante seems to have inherited on 

 the Teutonic side the strong moral sense, the almost nervous 

 irritability of conscience, and the tendency to mysticism 

 which made him the first of Christian poets first in point 

 of time and first in point of greatness. From the other 

 side he seems to have received almost in overplus a feeling 



