CHAUCER. 257 



and lineaments of universal human life, beyond which 

 Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter. 

 As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linnaeus num 

 bered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of 

 men.&quot; In his outside accessories, it is true, he sometimes 

 seems as minute as if he were illuminating a missal. 

 Nothing escapes his sure eye for the picturesque the cut 

 of the beard, the soil of armour on the buff jerkin, the rust 

 on the sword, the expression of the eye. But in this he 

 has an artistic purpose. It is here that he individualises, 

 and, while every touch harmonises with and seems to com 

 plete the moral features of the character, makes us feel 

 that we are among living men, and not the abstract images 

 of men. Crabbe adds particular to particular, scattering 

 rather than deepening the impression of reality, and mak 

 ing us feel as if every man were a species by himself; but 

 Chaucer, never forgetting the essential sameness of human 

 nature, makes it possible, and even probable, that his 

 motley characters should meet on a common footing, while 

 he gives to each the expression that belongs to him, the 

 result of special circumstance or training. Indeed, the 

 absence of any suggestion of caste cannot fail to strike any 

 reader familiar with the literature on which he is supposed 

 to have formed himself. No characters are at once so 

 broadly human and so definitely outlined as his. Belong 

 ing, some of them, to extinct types, they continue contem 

 porary and familiar for ever. So wide is the difference 

 between knowing a great many men and that knowledge of 

 human nature which comes of sympathetic insight and not 

 of observation alone. 



It is this power of sympathy which makes Chaucer s 

 satire so kindly more so, one is tempted to say, than the 

 panegyric of Pope. Intellectual satire gets its force from 

 personal or moral antipathy, and measures offences by some 

 rigid conventional standard. Its mouth waters over a gall 

 ing word, and it loves to say Thou, pointing out its victim 

 to public scorn. Indiynatio facit versus, it boasts, though 

 they might as often be fathered on envy or hatred. But 



