CHAUCER. 233 



who has done more for the gi'eat poet's memory than 

 any man since T;yTwhitt. We earnestly hope that the 

 Society may find enough support to print all the re- 

 maining manuscript texts of importance, for there can 

 hardly be any one of them that may not help us to a 

 valuable hint. The works of Mr. Sandras and Herr 

 Hertzberg show that this is a matter of interest not 

 merely or even primarily to English scholars. The in- 

 troduction to the latter is one of the best essays on 

 Chaucer yet written, while the former, which is an in- 

 vestigation of the French and Italian sources of the 

 poet, supplies us with much that is new and worth 

 having as respects the training of the poet, and the 

 obstacles of fashion and taste through which he had to 

 force his way before he could find free play for his native 

 genius or even so much as arrive at a consciousness 

 thereof. M. Sandras is in every way a worthy pupil of 

 the accomplished M. Victor Leclerc, and, though he lays 

 perhaps a little too much stress on the indebtedness of 

 Chaucer in particulars, shows a singiilarly intelligent 

 and clear-sighted eye for the general grounds of his 

 claim to greatness and originality. It is these grounds 

 which I propose chiefly to examine here. 



The first question we put to any poet, nay, to any 

 so-called national literature, is that which Farinata 

 addressed to Dante, Chi fur li maggior tui ? Here is no 

 question of plagiarism, for poems are not made of words 

 and thoughts and images, but of that something in the 

 poet himself which can compel them to obey him and 

 move to the rhythm of his nature. Thus it is that the 

 new poet, however late he come, can never be forestalled, 

 and the ship-builder who built the pinnace of Columbus 

 has as much claim to the discovery of America as he 

 who suggests a thought by which some other man opens 

 new worlds to us has to a share in that achievement by 



