264 CHAUCER. 



land, also, we are not to forget a certain charm of dis 

 tance in the very language they use, making it unhack 

 neyed without being alien. As it is the chief function 

 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 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 eighth syllable, where the verse was to be 

 folded over again into another layer. He says, for ex 

 ample, 



" This maiden Canacee was hight, 

 Both in the day and eke by night," 



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 " Man of 

 Law's Tale,"- 



" Me lists not of the chaff nor of the straw 

 To make so long a tale as of the corn." 



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

 was also one of the best versifiers that ever made Eng 

 lish trip and sing with a gayety 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 



