CHAUCER. 279 



uniform pitch which penetrates our interest and retains 

 it, where mere loudness would only disturb and irritate. 

 Not that Chaucer cannot be intense, too, on occasion ; 

 but it is with a quiet intensity of his own, that comes in 

 as it were by accident. 



" Upon a thicke palfrey, paper-white, 

 With saddle red embroidered with delight, 

 Sits Dido: 



And she is fair as is the brighte morrow 

 That healeth sicke folk of nightes sorrow. 

 Upon a courser startling as the fire, 



Pandarus, looking at Troilus, 



" Took up a light and found his countenance 

 As for to look upon an old romance." 



With Chaucer it is always the thing itself and not the 

 description of it that is the main object. His picturesque 

 bits are incidental to the story, glimpsed in passing ; they 

 never stop the way. His key is so low that his high 

 lights are never obtrusive. His imitators, like Leigh 

 Hunt, and Keats in his " Endymion," missing the nice 

 gradation with which the master toned everything down, 

 become streaky. Hogarth, who reminds one of him in 

 the variety and natural action of his figures, is like him 

 also in the subdued brilliancy of his coloring. When 

 Chaucer condenses, it is because his conception is vivid. 

 He does not need to personify Revenge, for personifica 

 tion is but the subterfuge of unimaginative and profes 

 sional poets ; but he embodies the very passion itself in 

 a verse that makes us glance over our shoulder as if we 

 heard a stealthy tread behind us : 



" The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak." * 



And yet how unlike is the operation of the imaginative 

 faculty in him and Shakespeare ! When the latter de- 



* Compare this with the Mumbo-Jumbo Revenge in Collins's Ode. 



