Rise and Progress of Englsh Poetry. 295 
student too, and one who enriched much that is beautiful 
in itself, is evident to every reflecting mind. 
In endeavouring to trace the first source from which our 
modern poetry sprang, and to show that it was in some 
degree influenced by the reflective grandeur of the Italian 
school, which awakened such beauty in our own bard, that 
much of the current of Chaucer’s mind was fed by the poets 
- of Italy. We need only take, by way of comparison, the 
lines, inhis ‘Knight’s Tale, descriptive of the deathof Arcite, 
with the style displayed by Petrarch in that very beautiful 
passage on the death of Laura. Again, he is undoubtedly 
indebted to the Decameron of Boccaccio, for the concep- 
tion of his picture in the Canterbury Pilgrims, in which 
much of the coarseness of the one is equally conspicuous 
in the other. The personages here delineated—such as 
the Lawyer, the Doctor, the Gap-Toothed Wife of Bath, 
even at this lapse of time, all identify themselves. 
Time forbids us to enter fully into any appreciation of 
Chaucer's merits. We will, therefore, press forward on our 
onward course, by remarking that, although Lydgate, 
Surrey, Sackville, Wyatt, and a host of others, succeeded, 
and were contemporaneous with Chaucer, none approached 
his merits till about a century afterwards, and thus we 
merge, by no imperceptible means, into the Elizabethan 
period. Here we are called upon to mention Edmond 
Spencer, who, at the time, was Secretary to Lord Gray, the 
then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and during his avoca- 
tions there—like many men in position in modern times— 
devoted his leisure time to literature, and prompted him to 
give to the world his Faery Queen—one of the most mag- 
nificently allegorical poems genius ever produced. How 
beautiful soever this poem may be, it cannot help being 
a matter of profound regret, that Spencer had not the 
policy, forethought, and determination, to sink allegory in 
personification. Unlike Virgil, the sublimest poet, and in- 
disputably the greatest flatterer of antiquity, whose popu- 
larity may, and most probably did, spring from the fact of 
his using real instead of allegorical personages, as the 
burthen of his muse,—Spencer, on the contrary, preferred 
the latter, a fact which more than any other, has tended to 
consign to neglect, one of the sublimest efforts genius ever 
achieved. The Elizabethan period of English literature 
had this advantage overantecedent ones: Our Anglo-Saxon 
language was becoming more fixed: Elizabeth herself, a 
great patroness of literature in general, but of poetry in 
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