after their bearings; and you will satisfy yourself, that although the cleaving of heads, and the transpiercing of trunks, and the hewing off of limbs, are processes that must always keep up a certain general resemblance to themselves, you have not a campaign imitated from the Iliad; but an original oneproper to person and place.

DRYDEN ON CHAUCER.

[Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1845.]

NOTHING is gained by attempting to deny or to disguise a known and plain fact, simply because it happens to be a distasteful one. Time has estranged us from Chaucer. Dryden and Pope we read with easy, unearned pleasure. Their speech, their manner of mind, and their facile verse, are of our age, almost of our own day. The two excellent, graceful, and masterly poets belong, both of them, to THIS NEW WORLD. Go back a little, step over an imperceptible line, to the cotemporary of Dryden, Milton, and you seem to have overleaped some great chronological boundary; you have transported yourself into THAT OLD WORLD. Whether the

historical date, or the gigantic soul, or the learned art, make the separation, the fact is clear, that the poet of the "Paradise Lost" stands decidedly further off; and, more or less, you must acquire the taste and intelligence of the poem. Why, up to this hour, probably, there are three-fifths of the poem that you have not read; or, if you have read all, and go along with all, you have yourself had experience of the progress, and have felt your capacity of Milton grow and dilate. So has it been with your capacity for Shakspeare, or you are a truant and an idler. To comprehend with delight Milton and Shakspeare as poets, you need, from the beginning, a soul otherwise touched and gifted for poesy than Pope claims of you, or Dryden. The great elder masters, being original, require of you springs of poesy welling in your own spirit; while the two latter, imitative artists of luxury, exact from you nothing more, in the way of poetical endowment, than the gusto of ease and luxurious enchantment. To prefer, for some intellectual journey, the smooth wafture of an air-gliding car-to look with pleasure upon a dance of bright-hued images-to hear more sweetness in Philomela's descant than in a Turkish concert-to be ever

so little sensible to the bliss of dreams-ever so little sick of reality, and ever so little glad to be rid of it for an hour-is qualification enough to make you a willing and able reader of verse in the latter school. But if you are to prefer the style of the antecessors, other conditions must come in. It is, then, not a question merely whether you see and love in Imogen the ideal of a wife in love with her husband, or take to the surpassing and inimitable portraiture of the "lost archangel" in Satan; but whether you feel the sweetness of Imogen's soul in the music of her expressions-whether you hear the tones of the Will that not the thunder has quelled, in that voice to which all "the hollow deep of hell resounded." If you do, assuredly you will perceive in yourself that these are discernments of a higher cast, and that place you upon a higher degree when critics on poetry come to be ranked, than when you had nothing better to say for yourself than that your bosom bled at the Elegy on an Unfortunate Young Lady, or that you varied with Alexander to the varying current of the Ode of St. Cecilia's Day.

We call Chaucer the Father of our Poetry, or its Morning Star. The poetical memory of the country stretches up to him, and not beyond. The commanding impression which he has made upon the minds of his people dates from his own day. The old poets of England and Scotland constantly and unanimously acknowledge him for their master. Greatest names, Dunbar, Douglas, Spenser, Milton carry on the tradition of his renown and his reign.

In part he belongs to, and in part he lifts himself out of, his age. The vernacular poetry of reviving Europe took a strong stamp from one principal feature in the manners of the times. The wonderful political institution of Chivalry -turned into a romance in the minds of those in whose persons the thing itself subsisted-raised up a fanciful adoration of women into a law of courtly life; or, at the least, of courtly verse, to which there was nothing answerable in the annals of the old world. For though the chief and most potent of human passions has never lacked its place at the side of war in the song that spoke of heroes-though two beautiful captives, and a runaway wife bestowed by the Goddess of Beauty, and herself the paragon of beauty to all tongues and ages, have grounded the Iliad-though the Scæan gate, from which Hector began to flee his inevitable foe, and where that goddess-born foe himself stooped to des

tiny, be also remembered for the last parting of a husband and a wife-though Circe and Calypso have hindered home-bound Ulysses from the longing arms of Penelopeand Jason, leading the flower of a prior and yet more heroic generation, must first win the heart of Medea before he may attain the Golden Fleece-though the veritable nature of the human being has ever thus, through its strongest passion, imaged itself in its most exquisite mirror, Poetry-yet there did, in reawaking Europe, a new love-poetry arise, distinctively characterized by the omnipotence which it ascribed to the Love-god, legitimating in him an usurped supremacy, and exhibiting, in artificial and wilful excess, that passion which the older poets drew in its powerful but unexaggerated and natural proportions.

Thenceforwards the verse of the South and of the North, and alike the forgotten and the imperishable, all attest the predominancy of the same star. Diamond eyes and ruby lips stir into sound the lute of the Troubadours and the Minnesingers. Famous bearers of either name were knights distinguished in the lists and in the field. And who is it that stole from heaven the immortal fire of genius for Petrarch? Laura. Who is the guide of Dante through Paradise? Beatrice. In our own language, the spirit of love breathes, more than in any other poet, in Spenser. His great poem is one Lay of Love, embodying and associating that idealized, chivalrous, and romantic union of "fierce warres and faithful loves." It hovers above the earth in some region exempt from mortal footing-wars such as never were, loves such as never were-and all-Allegory! One ethereal extravagance! A motto may be taken from him to describe that ascendency of the love-planet in the poetical sky of renewed Europe. It alludes to the love-freaks of the old Pagan deities upon earth, in which the King of the Gods excelled, as might be supposed, all the others.

"While thus on earth great Jove these pageants play'd,
The winged boy did thrust into his throne;

And scoffing thus, unto his mother sayde

'Lo! now the heavens obey to me alone

And take me for their Jove, now Jove to earth is gone.'

The pure truth of the poetical inspiration which rests upon Spenser's poems, when compared to the absolute departure from reality apparent in the manners of his heroes and heroines, and in the physical world which they inhabit, is a

phenomenon which may well perplex the philosophical critic. You will hardly dare to refuse to any true poet the self-election of his materials. Grant, therefore, to Spenser knighterrantry-grant him dragons, and enchanters, and enchanted gardens, satyrs, and the goddess Night on her chariot-grant him love as the single purpose of human life-a faëry power leading with a faery band his faëry world! But while you accept this Poem as the lawful consummation and ending of that fabulous intellectual system or dream which had subsisted with authority for centuries, it is wonderful to see how, in the very day of Spenser, the STAGE recovers humanity and nature to poetry-recalls poetry to nature and humanity! Shakspeare and Spenser, what cotemporaries! The world that is, and the world that is not, twinned in time and in power!

This exaggeration of an immense natural power, Lovemaking, one might almost say, man's worship of woman the great religion of the universe, and which was the "amabilis insania" of the new poetry-long exercised an unlimited monarchy in the poetical mind of the reasonable Chaucer. See the longest and most desperate of his Translationswhich Tyrwhitt supposes him to have completed, though we have only two fragments-seven thousand verses in place of twenty-two thousand-the "Romaunt of the ROSE," otherwise entitled the " Art of Love," "wherein are showed the helps and furtherances, as also the lets and impediments, that lovers have in their suits." Then comes the work upon which Sir Philip Sydney seems to rest the right of Chaucer to the renown of an excellent poet having the insight of his art-the five long books which celebrate the type of all true lovers, Troilus, and of all false traitresses, Creseide. Then there is "The Legende of GOODE Women," the loving herones, fabulous and historical, of Lemprière's Dictionary. The first name is decisive upon the signification of "goode," -Cleopatras, Queene of Egypt-Tisbe of Babylon-Dido, Queene of Carthage-Hipsiphile and Medea, betrayed both by the same root of false lovers, Duk Jason"-Lucrece of Rome-Ariadne of Athens-Philomen-Phillis-Hyperm

nestra.

The "Assemblee of Foules" is all for love and allegory. Chaucer has been reading Scipio's dream. Whereon he himself dreams that "Affrican" comes to him and carries him away into a sort of Love's Paradise. There were trees with