282 CHAUCER. 



phrase is never importunate. His simplicity is that of 

 elegance, not of poverty. The quiet unconcern with 

 ■which he says his best things is peculiar to him among 

 English poets, though Goldsmith, Addison, and Thack- 

 eray have approached it in prose. He prattles inad- 

 vertently away, and all the while, like the princess in the 

 story, lets fall a pearl at every other word. It is such a 

 piece of good luck to be natural ! It is the good gift 

 which the fairy godmother brings to her prime favorites 

 in the cradle. If not genius, it is alone what makes 

 genius amiable in the arts. If a man have it not, he will 

 never find it, for when it is sought it is gone. 



When Chaucer describes anything, it is commonly by 

 one of those simple and obvious epithets or qualities that 

 are so easy to miss. Is it a woman 1 He tells us she 

 is fresh; that she has glad eyes ; that " every day her 

 beauty newed " ; that 



" Methought sill fellowship as naked 

 Withouten her that I saw once, 

 As a corone without the stones." 



Sometimes he describes amply by the merest hint, as 

 where the Friar, before setting himself softly down, 

 drives away the cat. We know without need of more 

 words that he has chosen the snuggest corner. In some 

 of his early poems he sometimes, it is true, falls into the 

 catalogue style of his contemporaries ; but after he had 

 found his genius he never particularizes too much, — a 

 process as deadly to all effect as an explanation to a pun. 

 The first stanza of the " Clerk's Tale " gives us a land- 

 scape whose stately choice of objects shows a skill in 

 composition worthy of Claude, the last artist who painted 

 nature epically : — 



" There is at the west ende of Itaile, 

 Down at the foot of Vesulns the cold, 

 A lusty plain abundant of vitaile, 



