254 CHAUCER. 



justice of God, and Chaucer his loving-kindness. If 

 there is anything that may properly be called satire in 

 the one, it is like a blast of the divine wrath, before 

 which the wretches cower and tremble, which rends 

 away their cloaks of hypocrisy and their masks of worldly 

 propriety, and leaves them shivering in the cruel naked- 

 ness of their shame. The satire of the other is genial 

 with the broad sunshine of humor, into which the vic- 

 tims walk forth with a delightful unconcern, laying aside 

 of themselves the disguises that seem to make them un- 

 comfortably warai, till they have made a thorough be- 

 trayal of themselves so unconsciously that we almost 

 pity while we laugh. Dante shows us the punishment 

 of sins against God and one's neighbor, in order that we 

 may shun them, and so escape the doom that awaits them 

 in the other world. Chaucer exposes the cheats of the 

 transmuter of metals, of the begging friars, and of the 

 pedlers of indulgences, in order that we may be on our 

 guard against them in this world. If we are to judge of 

 what is national only by the highest and most chai'ac- 

 teristic types, surely we cannot fail to see in Chaucer 

 the true forerunner and prototype of Shakespeare, who, 

 with an imagination of far deej^er gi'asp, a far wider 

 reach of thought, yet took the same delight in the 

 pageantry of the actual world, and whose moral is the 

 moral of worldly wisdom only heightened to the level 

 of his wide-viewing mind, and made typical by the dra- 

 matic energy of his plastic nature. 



Yet if Chaucer had little of that organic force of life 

 which so inspires the poem of Dante that, as he himself 

 says of the heavens, part answers to part with mutual 

 interchange of light, he had a structural faculty which 

 distinguishes him from all other English poets, his con- 

 temporaries, and which indeed is the primary distinction 

 of poets properly so called. There is, to be sure, only 



