CHAUCER. 231 



is no touch of cynicism in all he wrote. Dante s brush 

 seems sometimes to have been smeared with the burning 

 pitch of his own fiery lake. Chaucer s pencil is dipped in 

 the cheerful colour-box of the old illuminators, and he has 

 their patient delicacy of touch, with a freedom far beyond 

 their somewhat mechanic brilliancy. 



English narrative poetry, as Chaucer found it, though it 

 had not altogether escaped from the primal curse of long- 

 windedness so painfully characteristic of its prototype, the 

 French Romance of Chivalry, had certainly shown a feeling 

 for the picturesque, a sense of colour, a directness of phrase, 

 and a simplicity of treatment, which give it graces of its 

 own and a turn peculiar to itself. In the easy knack of 

 story-telling, the popular minstrels cannot compare with 

 Marie de France. The lightsomeness of fancy, that leaves 

 a touch of sunshine and is gone, is painfully missed in them 

 all. Their incidents enter dispersedly, as the old stage 

 directions used to say, and they have not learned the art of 

 concentrating their force on the key-point of their hearers 

 interest. They neither get fairlv hold of their subject, nor, 

 what is more important, does it get hold of them. But 

 they sometimes yield to an instinctive hint of leaving-off at 

 the right moment, and in their happy negligence achieve 

 an effect only to be matched by the highest successes of art. 



&quot; That lady heard his mourning all 

 Right under her chamber wall, 

 In her oriel where she was, 

 Closed well with royal glass ; 

 Fulfilled it was with imagery 

 Every window, by and by ; 

 On each side had there a gin 

 Sperred with many a divers pin ; 

 Anon that lady fair and free 

 Undid a pin of ivory 

 And wide the window she open^set, 

 The sun shone in at her closet.&quot; 



It is true the old rhymer relapses a little into the habitual 

 drone of his class, and shows half a mind to bolt into their 

 common inventory style when he comes to his gins and 



