those commentators, who could see nothing in the Beatrice thus beautifully portrayed, thus tenderly lamented, and thus sublimely commemorated, but a mere allegorical personage, the creation of a poet's fancy? Nothing can come of nothing; and it was no unreal or imaginary being who turned the course of Dante's ardent passions and active spirit, and burning enthusiasm, into one sweeping torrent of love and poetry, and gave to Italy and to the world the Divina Commedia !

CHAPTER X.

CHAUCER AND PHILIPPA PICARD.

AFTER Italy, England,-who has ever trod in her footsteps, and at length outstripped her in the race of intellect, was the next to produce a great and prevailing genius in poetry, a master spirit, whom no change of customs, manners, or language can render wholly obsolete; and who was destined, like the rest of his tribe, to bow before the influence of woman, to toil in her praise, and soar by her inspiration.

Seven years after the death of Dante, Chaucer was born, and he was twenty-four years younger than Petrarch, whom he met at Padua in 1373;

this meeting between the two great poets was memorable in itself, and yet more interesting for having first introduced into the English language that beautiful monument to the virtue of women,the story of Griselda.

Boccaccio had lately sent to his friend the MS. of the Decamerone, of which it is the concluding tale: the tender fancy of Petrarch, refined by a forty years' attachment to a gentle and elegant female, passed over what was vicious and blamable, or only recommended by the wit and the style, and fixed with delight on the tale of Griselda; so beautiful in itself, and so honorable to the sex whom he had poetically deified in the person of one lovely woman. He amused his leisure hours in translating it into Latin, and having finished his version, he placed it in the hands of a citizen of Padua, and desired him to read it aloud. His friend accordingly began; but as he proceeded, the overpowering pathos of the story so affected him, that he was obliged to stop; he began again, but was unable to proceed; the gathering tears blinded him, and choked his voice, and he threw down the manuscript. This incident, which Petrarch himself relates in a letter to Boccaccio, occurred about the period when Chaucer passed from Genoa to Padua to visit the poet and lover of Laura

Quel grande, alla cui fama angusto è il mondo.

Petrarch must have regarded the English poet with that wondering, enthusiastic admiration with

which we should now hail a Milton or a Shakspeare sprung from Otaheite or Nova Zembla; and his heart and soul being naturally occupied by his latest work, he repeated the experiment he had before tried on his Paduan friend. The impres sion which the Griselda produced upon the vivid, susceptible imagination of Chaucer, may be judged from his own beautiful version of it in the Canterbury Tales; where the barbarity and improbability of the incidents are so redeemed by the pervading truth and purity and tenderness of the sentiment, that I suppose it never was perused for the first time without tears. Chaucer, as if proud of his interview with Petrarch, and anxious to publish it, is careful to tell us that he did not derive the story from Boccaccio, but that it was

Learned at Padua of a worthy clerk,
As proved by his wordes and his work;
Francis Petrark, the Laureat Poete;

which is also proved by internal evidence.

Chaucer so far resembled Petrarch, that, like him, he was at once poet, scholar, courtier, statesman, philosopher, and man of the world; but considered merely as poets, they were the very antipodes of each other. The genius of Dante has been compared to a Gothic cathedral, vast and lofty, and dark and irregular. In the same spirit, Petrarch may be likened to a classical and elegant Greek temple, rising aloft in its fair and faultless proportions, and compacted of the purest Parian

marble; while Chaucer is like the far-spreading and picturesque palace of the Alhambra, with its hundred chambers, all variously decorated, and rich with barbaric pomp and gold: he is famed rather as the animated painter of character, and manners, and external nature, than the poet of love and sentiment; and yet no writer, Shakspeare always excepted, (and perhaps Spenser) contains so many beautiful and tender passages relating to, or inspired by women. He lived, it is true, in rude times, strangely deficient in good taste and decorum; but when all the institutions of chivalry, under the most chivalrous of our kings and princes,* were at their height in England. As a poet, Chaucer was enlisted into the service of three of the most illustrious, most beautiful, and most accomplished women of that age-Philippa, the highhearted and generous Queen of Edward the Third; the Lady Blanche of Lancaster, first wife of John of Gaunt; and the lovely Anne of Bohemia, the Queen of Richard the Second;† for whom, and at whose command, he wrote his “Legende of Gode

* Edward III. and the Black Prince.

She was popularly distinguished as the "good Queen Anne,” and as dear to her husband as to her people. Richard, who with many and fatal faults, really possessed sensibility and strong domestic affections with which Shakspeare has so finely portrayed him, was passionately devoted to his amiable wife. She died young, at the Palace of Sheen; and when Richard afterwards vise ited the scene of his loss, he solemnly cursed it in his anguish, and commanded it to be razed to the ground, which was done. One of our kings afterwards rebuilt it. I think Henry the Sev enth.

Woman," as some amends for the scandal he had spoken of us in other places. The Countess of Essex, the Countess of Pembroke, and that beautiful Lady Salisbury, the ancestress of the Montagu family, whose famous mischance gave rise to the Order of the Garter, were also among Chaucer's patronesses. But the most distinguished of all, and the favorite subject of his poetry, was the Duchess Blanche. The manner in which he has contrived to celebrate his own loves and individual feelings with those of Blanche and her royal suitor, has given additional interest to both, and has enabled his commentators to fix with tolerable certainty the name and rank of the object of his love, as well as the date and circumstances of his attachment.

In the earliest of Chaucer's poems, "THE COURT OF LOVE," he describes himself as enamoured of a fair mistress, whom, in the style of the time, he calls Rosial, and himself Philogenet: the lady is described as 66 sprung of noble race and high," with angel visage," "golden hair," and eyes orient and bright, with figure, "sharply slender,"

66

So that from the head unto the foot all is sweet womanhead,

and arrayed in a vest of green, with her tresses braided with silk and gold. She treats him at first with disdain, and the Poet swoons away at her feet satisfied by this convincing proof of his sincerity, she is induced to accept his homage, and