1 74 June Chaucer s 'abounding Eloquence. 



to talk about his enjoyment of Nature, hardly knows 

 how or when to stop ; he has the abounding eloquence 

 of a warm and earnest enthusiasm, the freshness and 

 \/ variety of his ideas and sensations suggest an equal 

 variety and abundance of poetical expression ; he tries 

 hard to utter all that is in him, very frequently finds 

 that he has not yet succeeded to his mind, and tries 

 again and again, but without effacing the previous 

 attempts, so that there is a string of them one after 

 another. Hence Virgil may be quoted easily ; there 

 are passages of his, not more than three words long, 

 which afford excellent quotations and good subjects 

 for literary disquisition : whereas to quote Chaucer is 

 difficult in the extreme, for he leads you down to the 

 bottom of the page, and over the leaf, before you have 

 time to pause. Of course I am clearly aware that a 

 comparison of this kind cannot be made with justice 

 unless we duly consider the reserve which was a part 

 of the classical temper, and the remarkable tendency 

 to think 'it is enough/ which formed habits of work 

 in classic artists so directly opposed to the careless 

 fecundity of the mediaeval ones, and to the money- 

 getting productiveness of the moderns. It is quite 

 evident that if Virgil, whilst retaining this classical 

 reserve, had been imbued with Chaucer's passion for 

 flowers and birds, and spring mornings in the woods 

 and by streams, he would have concentrated the utter- 

 ance of it into a tenth of the space that Chaucer covered 

 with his facile verse ; but then the utterance would have 

 been all the more intense and powerful for that very 



