238 CHAUCER. 



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 Tie that seems so well-meaning! Even 

 Shakespeare, who seems to come in after everybody has 

 done his best with a &quot; Let me take hold a minute and show 

 you how to do it,&quot; could not have bettered this. 



&quot; Piers Ploughman &quot; 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 pro 

 verbial 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 

 musical instrument. If we should seek for a single word 

 that would define it most precisely, we should not choose 

 simplicity, but homeliness. There is more or less of this in 

 all early poetry, to be sure ; but I think it especially proper 

 to English poets, and to the most English among them, like 

 Cowper, Orabbe, and one is tempted to add Wordsworth 

 where he forget s Coleridge s private lectures. In reading 

 such poets as Langland, also, we are not to forget a certain 

 charm of distance in the very language they use, making it 

 unhackneyed without being alien. As it is the chief func 

 tion of the poet to make the familiar novel, these fortunate 

 early risers of literature, who gather phrases with the dew 

 still on them, have their poetry done for them, as it were, 

 by their vocabulary. But in Chaucer, as in all great poets, 

 the language gets its charm from him. The force and 

 sweetness of his genius kneaded more kindly together the 

 Latin and Teutonic elements of our mother tongue, and 

 made something better than either. The necessity of 

 writing poetry, and not mere verse, made him a reformer 

 whether he would or no ; and the instinct of his finer ear 



