234 CHAUCER. 



grace, ease, and dignity in their own despite. In order to 

 feel fully how much he achieved, let any one subject him 

 self to a penitential course of reading in his contemporary, 

 Gower, who worked in a material to all intents and pur 

 poses the same, or listen for a moment to the barbarous 

 jangle which Lydgate and Occleve contrive to draw from 

 the instrument their master had tuned so deftly. Gower 

 has positively raised tediousness to the precision of science, 

 he has made dulness an heirloom for the students of our 

 literary history. As you slip to and fro on the frozen 

 levels of his verse, which give no foothold to the mind, as 

 your nervous ear awaits the inevitable recurrence of his 

 rhyme, regularly pertinacious as the tick of an eight-day 

 clock, and reminding you of Wordsworth s 



&quot; Once more the ass did lengthen out 

 The hard, dry, seesaw of his horrible bray,&quot; 



you learn to dread, almost to respect, the powers of this 

 indefatigable man. He is the undertaker of the fair 

 mediaeval legend, and his style has the hateful gloss, the 

 seemingly unnatural length, of a coffin. Love, beauty, pas 

 sion, nature, art, life, the natural and theological virtues, 

 there is nothing beyond his power to disenchant, nothing 

 out of which the tremendous hydraulic press of his allegory 

 (or whatever it is, for I am not sure if it be not something 

 even worse) will not squeeze all feeling and freshness and 

 leave it a juiceless pulp. It matters not where you try 

 him, whether his story be Christian or pagan, borrowed 

 from history or fable, you cannot escape him. Dip in at 

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

 patient old man is there to take you by the button and go 

 on with his imperturbable narrative. You may have left 

 off with Clytemnestra, 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 



