following in the wake of those who have already reaped the harvest of amorous song, and have carried away the corn:

"And I come after, gleaning here and there,
And am full glad if I can find an ear

Of any goodly word that ye have left."

Modesty of this stamp is perfectly compatible with a certain self-consciousness which is hardly ever absent from greatness, and which at all events supplies a stimulus not easily dispensed with except by sustained effort on the part of a poet. The two qualities seem naturally to combine into that self-containedness (very different from self-contentedness) which distinguishes Chaucer, and which helps to give to his writings a manliness of tone, the direct opposite of the irretentive querulousness found in so great a number of poets in all times. He cannot, indeed, be said to maintain an absolute reserve concerning himself and his affairs in his writings; but as he grows older, he seems to become less and less inclined to take the public into his confidence, or to speak of himself except in a pleasantly light and incidental fashion. And in the same spirit he seems, without ever folding his hands in his lap, or ceasing to be a busy man and an assiduous author, to have grown indifferent to the lack of brilliant success in life, whether as a man of letters or otherwise. So at least one seems justified in interpreting a remarkable passage in the House of Fame, the poem in which, perhaps, Chaucer allows us to see more deeply into his mind than in any other. After surveying the various company of those who had come as suitors for the favors of Fame, he tells us how it seemed to him (in his long December dream) that some one spoke to him in a kindly way,

And saidë: 'Friend, what is thy name?
Art thou come hither to have fame ?
Nay, forsoothë, friend!' quoth I;
'I came not hither (grand merci!)
For no such cause, by my head!
Sufficeth me, as I were dead,

That no wight have my name in hand.
I wot myself best how I stand;
For what I suffer, or what I think,

I will myselfë all it drink,

Or at least the greater part

As far forth as I know my art.""

With this modest but manly self-possession we shall not go far wrong in connecting what seems another very distinctly marked feature of Chaucer's inner nature. He seems to have arrived at a clear recognition of the truth with which Goethe humorously comforted Eckermann in the shape of the proverbial saying, “Care has been taken that the trees shall not grow into the sky." Chaucer's, there is every reason to believe, was a contented faith, as far removed from self-torturing unrest as from childish credulity. Hence his

refusal to trouble himself, now that he has arrived at a good age, with original research as to the contellations. (The passage is all the more significant since Chaucer, as has been seen, actually possessed a very respectable knowledge of astronomy.) That winged encyclopædia, the Eagle, has just been regretting the poet's unwillingness to learn the position of the Great and the Little Bear, Castor and Pollux, and the rest, concerning which at present he does not know where they stand. But he replies, "No matter!

Moreover, as he says (probably without implying any special allegorical meaning), they seem so bright that it would destroy my eyes to look upon them. Personal inspection, in his opinion, was not necessary for a faith which at some times may, and at others must, take the place of knowledge; for we find him, at the opening of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, in a passage the tone of which should not be taken to imply less than its words express, writing as follows:

"A thousand times I have heard men tell,

That there is joy in heaven, and pain in hell;
And I accorde well that it is so.

But nathëless, yet wot I well alsó,

That there is none doth in this country dwell
That either hath in heaven been or hell,

Ör

any other way could of it know,

But that he heard, or found it written so,

For by assay may no man proof receive.

But God forbid that men should not believe

More things than they have ever seen with eye!
Men shall not fancy everything a lie

Unless themselves it see, or else it do;

For, God wot, not the less a thing is true,

Though every wight may not it chance to see.'

The central thought of these lines, though it afterwards receives a narrower and more commonplace application, is no other than that which has been so splendidly expressed by Spenser in the couplet:

"Why then should witless man so much misween

That nothing is but that which he hath seen?"

The negative result produced in Chaucer's mind by this firm but placid way of regarding matters of faith was a distrust of astrology, alchemy, and all the superstitions which in the Parson's Tale are noticed as condemned by the Church. This distrust on Chaucer's part requires no further illustration after what has been said elsewhere; it would have been well for his age if all its children had been as clear-sighted in these matters as he, to whom the practices con

nected with these delusive sciences seemed, and justly so from his point of view, not less impious, than futile. His Canon Yeoman's Tale, a story of imposture so vividly dramatic in its catastrophe as to have suggested to Ben Jonson one of the most effective passages in his comedy The Alchemist, concludes with a moral of unmistakable solemnity against the sinfulness, as well as uselessness, of “multiplying" (making gold by the arts of alchemy):—

Whoso maketh God his adversáry,

As for to work anything in contràry

Unto His will, certes ne'er shall he thrive,
Though that he multiply through all his life."

But equally unmistakable is the positive side of this frame of mind in such a passage as the following-which is one of those belonging to Chaucer himself, and not taken from his French original-in The Man of Law's Tale. The narrator is speaking of the voyage of Constance, after her escape from the massacre in which, at a feast, all her fellowChristians had been killed, and of how she was borne by the “wild wave from "Surrey" (Syria) to the Northumbrian shore:

"

"Here men might askë, why she was not slain?

Eke at the feast who might her body save?

And I answere that demand again:

Who saved Daniel in th' horrible cave,

When every wight save him, master or knave,
The lion ate-before he could depart?

No wight but God, whom he bare in his heart."

"In her," he continues, "God desired to show His miraculous power, so that we should see His mighty works; for Christ, in whom we have a remedy for every ill, often by means of His own does things for ends of His own, which are obscure to the wit of man, incapable, by reason of our ignorance, of understanding His wise providence. But since Constance was not slain at the feast, it might be asked: Who kept her from drowning in the sea? Who, then, kept Jonas in the belly of the whale till he was spouted up at Ninive? Well do we know it was no one but He who kept the Hebrew people from drowning in the waters, and made them to pass through the sea with dry feet. Who bade the four spirits of the tempest, which have the power to trouble land and sea, north and south, and west and east, vex neither sea not land nor the trees that grow on it? Truly these things were ordered by Him who kept this woman safe from the tempest, as well when she awoke as when she slept. But whence might this woman have meat and drink, and how could her sustenance last out to her for three years and more? Who, then, fed Saint Mary the Egyptian in the cavern or in the desert? Assuredly no one but Christ. It was a great miracle to feed five thousand folk with five loaves and two fishes; but God in their great need sent to them abundance."

As to the sentiments and opinions of Chaucer, then, on matters such

as these, we can entertain no reasonable doubt. But we are altogether too ill acquainted with the details of his personal life, and with the motives which contributed to determine its course, to be able to arrive at any valid conclusions as to the way in which his principles affected his conduct, Enough has been already said concerning the attitude seemingly observed by him towards the great public questions and the great historical events of his day. If he had strong political opinions of his own, or strong personal views on questions either of ecclesiastical policy or of religious doctrine-in which assumptions there seems nothing probable-he, at all events, did not wear his heart on his sleeve, or use his poetry, allegorical or otherwise, as a vehicle of his wishes, hopes, or fears on these heads. The true breath of freedom could hardly be expected to blow through the precincts of a Plantagenet court. If Chaucer could write the pretty lines in the Manciple's Tale about the caged bird and its uncontrollable desire for liberty, his contemporary Barbour could apostrophize Freedom itself as a noble thing, in words the simple manliness of which stirs the blood after a very different fashion. Concerning his domestic relations, we may regard it as virtually certain that he was unhappy as a husband, though tender and affectionate as a father. Considering how vast a proportion of the satire of all times-but more especially that of the Middle Ages, and in these again pre-eminently of the period of European literature which took its tone from Jean de Meung-is directed against woman and against married life, it would be difficult to decide how much of the irony, sarcasm, and fun lavished by Chaucer on these themes is due to a fashion with which he readily fell in, and how much to the impulse of personal feeling. A perfect anthology, or perhaps one should rather say a complete herbarium, might be collected from his works of samples of these attacks on women. He has manifestly made a careful study of their ways, with which he now and then betrays that curiously intimate acquaintance to which we are accustomed in a Richardson or a Balzac. How accurate are such incidental remarks as this, that women are "full measurable" in such matters as sleep-not caring for so much of it at a time as men do! How wonderfully natural is the description of Cressid's bevy of lady-visitors, attracted by the news that she is shortly to be surrendered to the Greeks, and of the "nice vanity"-i. e., foolish emptiness-of their consolatory gossip. "As men see in town, and all about, that women are accustomed to visit their friends," so a swarm of ladies came to Cressid, "and sat themselves down, and said as I shall tell. I am delighted,' says one, ‘that you will so soon see your father.' 'Indeed I am not so delighted,' says another, 'for we have not seen half enough of her since she has been at Troy,' 'I do hope,' quoth the third, that she will bring us back peace with her; in which case may Almighty God guide her on her departure.' And Cressid heard these words and womanish things as if she were far away; for she was burning all the time with another passion than any of which they knew; so that she almost felt her heart

die for woe, and for weariness of that company." But his satire against women is rarely so innocent as this; and though several ladies take part in the Canterbury Pilgrimage, yet pilgrim after pilgrim has his saw or jest against their sex. The courteous Knight cannot refrain from the generalization that women all follow the favor of fortune. The Summoner, who is of a less scrupulous sort, introduces a diatribe against women's passionate love of vengeance; and the Shipman seasons a story which requires no such addition by an enumeration of their favorite foibles. But the climax is reached in the confessions of the Wife of Bath, who quite unhesitatingly says that women are best won by flattery and busy attentions; that when won they desire to have the sovereignty over their husbands, and that they tell untruths and swear to them with twice the boldness of men; while as to the power of their tongue, she quotes the second-hand authority of her fifth husband for the saying that it is better to dwell with a lion or a foul dragon than with a woman accustomed to chide. It is true that this same Wife of Bath also observes with an effective tu quoque:—

"By God, if women had but written stories,

As clerkës have within their oratòries,

They would have writ of men more wickedness
Than all the race of Adam may redress;"

and the Legend of Good Women seems, in point of fact, to have been intended to offer some such kind of amends as is here declared to be called for. But the balance still remains heavy against the poet's sentiments of gallantry and respect for women. It should, at the same time, be remembered that among the Canterbury Tales the two which are of their kind the most effective constitute tributes to the most distinctively feminine and wifely virtue of fidelity. Moreover, when coming from such personages as the pilgrims who narrate the Tales in question, the praise of women has special significance and value. The Merchant and the Shipman may indulge in facetious or coarse jibes against wives and their behavior; but the Man of Law, full of grave experience of the world, is a witness above suspicion to the womanly virtue of which his narrative celebrates so illustrious an example, while the Clerk of Oxford has in his cloistered solitude, where all womanly blandishments are unknown, come to the conclusion that

"Men speak of Job, most for his humbleness,

As clerkës, when they list, can well indite,

Of men in special; but, in truthfulness,

Though praise by clerks of women be but slight,

No man in humbleness can him acquit

As women can, nor can be half so true

As women are, unless all things be new."

As to marriage, Chaucer may be said generally to treat it in that style of laughing with a wry mouth, which has from time immemorial been affected both in comic writing and on the comic stage, but which in