CHAUCER. 251 



The Anglo-Saxons never had any real literature of 

 their own. They produced monkish chronicles in bad 

 Latin, and legends of saints in worse metre. Their 

 earlier poetry is essentially Scandinavian. It was that 

 gens inclytissima Northmannoruni that imported the 

 divine power of imagination, — that power which, min- 

 gled with the solid Saxon understanding, produced at 

 last the miracle of Stratford. It was to this adventur- 

 ous race, which found America before Columbus, which, 

 for the sake of freedom of thought, could colonize in- 

 hospitable Iceland, which, as it were, typifying the very 

 action of the imaginative faculty itself, identified itself 

 always with what it conquered, that we owe whatever 

 aquiline features there are in the national physiognomy 

 of the English race. It was through the Normans that 

 the English mind and fancy, hitherto provincial and 

 uncouth, were first infused with the lightness, grace, 

 and self-confidence of Romance literature. They seem 

 to have opened a window to the southward in that solid 

 and somewhat sombre insular character, and it was a 

 painted window all aglow with the figures of tradition 

 and poetiy. The old Gothic volume, grim with legends 

 of devilish temptation and satanic lore, they illuminated 

 with the gay and brilliant inventions of a softer climate 

 and more genial moods. Even the stories of Arthur 

 and his knights, toward which the stern Dante himself 

 relented so far as to call them gratissimas amhac/es, most 

 delightful circumlocutions, though of British original, 

 were first set free from the dungeon of a barbarous 

 dialect by the French poets, and so brought back to 

 England, and made popular there by the Normans. 



Chaucer, to whom French must have been almost as 

 truly a mother tongue as English, was familiar with all 

 that had been done by Troubadour or Trouvere. In 

 him we see the first result of the Norman yeast upon 



