CHAUCER. 239 



was a guide such as none before him or contemporary with 

 him, nor indeed any that came after him, till Spenser, could 

 command. Gower had no notion of the uses of rhyme 

 except as a kind of crease at the end of every e ghth 

 syllable, where the verse was to be folded over ag&in into 

 another layer. He says, for example, 



&quot; This maiden Canacee was Light, 

 Both in the day and eke by night,&quot; 



as if people commonly changed their names at dark. And 

 he could not even contrive to say this without the clumsy 

 pleonasm of both and eke. Chaucer was put to no such 

 shifts of piecing out his metre with loose -woven bits of 

 baser stuff. He himself says, in the &quot; Man of Law s 

 Tale,&quot; 



&quot; Me lists not of the chaff nor of the straw 

 To make so long a tale as of the corn.&quot; 



One of the world s three or four great story-tellers, he was 

 also one of the best versifiers that ever made English trip 

 and sing with a gaiety that seems careless, but where every 

 foot beats time to the tune of the thought. By the skilful 

 arrangement of his pauses he evaded the monotony of the 

 couplet, and gave to the rhymed pentameter, which he made 

 our heroic measure, something of the architectural repose 

 of blank verse. He found our language lumpish, stiff, 

 unwilling, too apt to speak Saxonly in grouty monosyllables ; 

 he left it enriched with the longer measure of the Italian 

 and Provengal poets. He reconciled, in the harmony of 

 his verse, the English bluntness with the dignity and 

 elegance of the less homely Southern speech. Though he 

 did not and could not create our language (for he who writes 

 to be read does not write for linguisters), yet it is true that 

 he first made it easy, and to that extent modern, so that 

 Spenser, two hundred years later, studied his method and 

 called him master. He first wrote English ; and it was a 

 feeling of this, I suspect, that made it fashionable in Eliza 

 beth s day to &quot; talk pure Chaucer.&quot; Already we find in his 



