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 generalisation that women all follow the favour 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 favourite 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 wickednéss
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 behaviour, 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 the end, even the most determined old bachelor feels an occasional inclination to consider monotonous.

In all this, however, it is obvious that something at least must be set down to conventionality. Yet the best part of Chaucer's nature, it is hardly necessary to say, was neither conventional nor commonplace. He was not, we may rest assured, one of that numerous class which in his days, as it does in ours, composed the population of the land of Philistia-the persons so well defined by the Scottish poet, Sir David Lyndsay (himself a courtier of the noblest type) :

:

Who fixed have their hearts and whole intents
On sensual lust, on dignity, and rents.

Doubtless Chaucer was a man of practical good sense, desirous of suitable employment and of a sufficient income; nor can we suppose him to have been one of those who look upon social life and its enjoyments with a jaundiced eye, or who, absorbed in things which are not of this world, avert their gaze from it altogether. But it is hardly possible that rank and position should have been valued on their own account by one who so repeatedly recurs to his ideal of the true gentleman, as to a conception dissociated from mere outward circumstances, and more particularly independent of birth or inherited wealth. At times, we know, men find what they seek; and so Chaucer found in Boëthius and in Guillaume de Lorris that conception which he both translates and reproduces, besides repeating it in a little Ballade, probably written by him in the last decennium of his life. By far the bestknown and the finest of these passages is that in the Wife of Bath's Tale, which follows the round assertion that the "arrogance" against which it protests is not worth. a hen; and which is followed by an appeal to a parallel passage in Dante :

:

Look, who that is most virtuous alway
Privy and open, and most intendeth aye
To do the gentle deedës that he can,
Take him for the greatest gentleman.
Christ wills we claim of Him our gentleness,
Not of our elders for their old richés.
For though they give us all their heritage
Through which we claim to be of high paráge,
Yet may they not bequeathë for no thing-
To none of us- -their virtuous living,
That made them gentlemen y-called be,
And bade us follow them in such degree.

Well can the wisë poet of Florénce,

That Dante hightë, speak of this sentence;
Lo, in such manner of rhyme is Dante's tale:
"Seldom upriseth by its branches small
Prowess of man; for God of His prowess
Wills that we claim of Him our gentleness;

For of our ancestors we no thing claim

But temporal thing, that men may hurt and maim."

By the still ignobler greed of money for its own sake there is no reason whatever to suppose Chaucer to have been at any time actuated; although, under the pressure of immediate want, he devoted a Complaint to his empty purse, and made known, in the proper quarters, his desire to see it refilled. Finally, as to what is commonly called pleasure, he may have shared the fashions and even the vices of his age; but we know hardly anything on the subject, except that excess in wine, which is often held a pardonable peccadillo in a poet, receives his emphatic condemnation. It would be hazardous to assert of him, as Herrick asserted of himself, that though his "Muse was jocund, his life was chaste;" inasmuch as his name occurs in one unfortunate connexion full of suspiciousness. But we may at least believe him to have spoken his own sentiments in the Doctor of Physic's manly declaration that

of all treason sovereign pestilence

Is when a man betrayeth innocence.

The passage in Canto viii. of the Purgatorio is thus trans. lated by Longfellow :

"Not oftentimes upriseth through the branches

The probity of man; and this He wills

Who gives it, so that we may ask of Him."

Its intention is only to show that the son is not necessarily what the father is before him; thus, Edward I. of England is a mightier man than was his father Henry III. Chaucer has ingeniously, though not altogether legitimately, pressed the passage into his service.

His true pleasures lay far away from those of vanity and dissipation. In the first place, he seems to have been a passionate reader. To his love of books he is constantly referring; indeed, this may be said to be the only kind of egotism which he seems to take a pleasure in indulging. At the opening of his earliest extant poem of consequence, the Book of the Duchess, he tells us how he preferred to drive away a night rendered sleepless through melancholy thoughts, by means of a book, which he thought better entertainment than a game either at chess or at “tables.” This passion lasted longer with him than the other passion which it had helped to allay; for in the sequel to the well-known passage in the House of Fame, already cited, he gives us a glimpse of himself at home, absorbed in his favourite pursuit :

Thou go'st home to thy house anon,
And there, as dumb as any stone,
Thou sittest at another book,

Till fully dazed is thy look;

And liv'st thus as a hermit quite,

Although thy abstinence is slight.

And doubtless he counted the days lost in which he was prevented from following the rule of life which elsewhere he sets himself, "to study and to read alway, day by day," and pressed even the nights into his service when he was not making his head ache with writing. How eager and, considering the times in which he lived, how diverse a reader he was, has already been abundantly illustrated in the course of this volume. His knowledge of Holy Writ was considerable, though it probably for the most part came to him at second-hand. He seems to have had some acquaintance with patristic and homiletic literature; he produced a version of the homily on Mary Magdalene,