CHAUCER. 257 



A little while then lay he still, 

 (Friends that saw him liked full ill,) 

 And bled into his armor bright." 



The last line, for suggestive reticence, almost deserves 

 to be put beside the famous 



" Quel giorno piii non vi leggemmo avante " 



of the great master of laconic narration. In the same 

 poem * the growing love of the lady, in its maidenliness 

 of unconscious betrayal, is touched with a delicacy and 

 tact as surprising as they are delightful. But such pas- 

 sages, which are the despair of poets who have to work 

 in a language that has faded into diction, are exceptional. 

 They are to be set down rather to good luck than to art. 

 Even the stereotyped similes of these fortunate illiterates, 

 like "weary as water in a weir," or "glad as grass is of 

 the rain," are new, like nature, at the thousandth repe- 

 tition. Perhaps our palled taste overvalues the wild 

 flavor of these wayside treasure-troves. They are wood- 

 strawberries, prized in proportion as we must turn over 

 more leaves ere we find one. This popular literature is 

 of value in helping us toward a juster estimate of Chaucer 

 by showing what the mere language was capable of, and 

 that all it wanted was a poet to put it through its paces. 

 For though the poems I have quoted be, in their present 

 form, later than he, they are, after all, but modernized 

 versions of older copies, which they doubtless reproduce 

 with substantial fidelity. 



It is commonly assumed that Chaucer did for English 

 what Dante is supposed to have done for Italian and 

 Luther for German, that he, in short, in some hitherto 

 inexplicable way, created it. But this is to speak loosely 

 and without book. Languages are never made in any 



* Sir Eger and Sir Grine in the Percy Folio. The passage quoted 

 k from Elii. 



