Happy among books, he was happy among men. Scorning only hypocrisy, he loved many-colored life,- its weakness and its strength, its delicacy and its force, its laughter and its tears. Modest, glad, and tender. Never were lovers more genuine, untainted and adoring, than his. Troilus and Creseide speak with hearts of primeval innocence. He had indeed said, perhaps in a momentary scepticism or irritation, of the courtly class whose stability seemed to lie in perpetual change:

'What man ymay the wind restrain,

Or holden a snake by the tail?

Who may a slipper eel restrain
That it will void withouten fail?
Or who can driven so a nail
To make sure newfangleness,
Save womer, that can gie their sail

To row their boat with doubleness?'

Yet for woman he had a true and chivalrous regard.

[inconstancy [guide

It was with

the avowed purpose of rendering homage to the beauty of pure womanhood that he wrote the legend —

'Of goode women, maidenes, and wives,

That weren true in loving all their lives.'

His emblem of womanly truth and purity was the daisy, with its head of gold and crown of white. And how he loves it!

'So glad am I, when that I have presence

Of it, to doon it alle reverence

As she that is of alle floures flour,

Fulfilled of all virtue and honour,

And ever alike fair and fresh of hue,

And I love it, and ever alike new,

And ever shall, till that mine herte die.'

I know of nothing like it,—this man of the world, of ceremonies and cavalcades, conversant with high and low, with gallant knights and bedizened ladies, far-travelled, tempest-tossed, and time-worn, turning from the gorgeous imagery that filled his vision to find 'revel and solace' in the open-air world, and dwelling with the glad, sweet abandon of a child, on the springing flowers, the green fields, the budding woods, the singing of the little birds:

'So loud they sang, that all the woodes rung
Like as it should shiver in pieces small;
And as methought that the Nightingale
With so great might her voice out-wrest,
Right as her heart for love would burst.'

Or the beauty of the morning. Were never sun-risings so exhilarating as his:

"The busy larke, messager of day
Saluteth in her song the morwe gray;
And fyry Phebus riseth up so bright
That al the orient laugheth of the light,
And with his stremes dryeth in the greves

The silver dropes hongying on the leeves.'

Sensitive to every change of feeling in himself and others, his sympathies were as large as the nature of man.

Bred among

aristocrats, he thought that good desires and 'gentil dedes' were

the only aristocracy.

Brave in misfortune.

Troubled he was, but no trouble could

extort from him a fretful note.

sings to his empty purse:

He easily shirks the burden, and

'To you my purse, and to none other wight,
Complain I, for ye be my lady dear;

I am sorry now that ye be so light,

For certes ye now make me heavy cheer:
Me were as lief be laid upon a bier,
For which unto your mercy thus I cry,
Be heavy again, or elles must I die.
Now vouchsafen this day ere it be night
That I of you the blissful sound may hear,
Or see your colour like the sunne bright,
That of yellowness ne had never peer;
Ye be my life, ye be my heartes steer;
Queen of comfort and of good company,
Be heavy again, or elles must I die.

Now purse, that art to me my lives light,
And saviour, as down in this world here,
Out of this towne help me by your might,
Sithen that you will not be my tresor,
For I am shave as nigh as any frere,

But I prayen unto your courtesy

Be heavy again, or elles must I die.'

[helm

The flying shadow of grief touches him, but does not rest there. Less sportive, he would have been less vulgar. Some of his pages are stained, but the blemishes are not of evil intent, and are rather to be imputed to the age. Our minds are tinged with the color of custom. Refinement preserves public decency, want of it permits the grossest violations. Having fixed upon his personage, Chaucer, as he himself pleads, had to adjust the tale to the teller. However,

'Who list not to hear,
Turn over the leaf, and choose another tale!'

His sympathies are with virtue.
gustful, as such, he has no taste.

For subjects obscene and dis-
It is not the filth he enjoys, but

the fun. Of two unnatural selections by the 'moral Gower,' he

cries:

Of all such cursed stones I say, Fy!'

He is a moralist, but a happy and humorous one; of an ethical temper, too indolent to make a reformer in the sense in which the fiery Langland or the stern Wycliffe was one. He was progressive without being revolutionary.

Influence. He rescued the native tongue from Babylonish confusion, and established a literary diction, banishing from Anglo-Saxon the superannuated and uncouth, and softening its churlish nature by the intermixture of words of Romance fancy.

He created, or introduced a new versification; exemplified the principle of syllabical regularity, which is now the law and the practice of our poetry; and by the superior correctness, grace, elevation, and harmony of his style, became the first model to succeeding writers.

He delineated English society with a pictorial force that makes us familiar with the domestic habits and modes of thinking of a most interesting and important period.

He is an unfailing fount of joy and strength, to revive the relish of simple pleasures, to bring back the freshness that warmed the springtime of our being, to refine youthful love, to make us esteem better the gentle and noble, and to feel more kindly towards the rude and base. Our market-places will be grass-grown, the hum of our industry will be stilled, but the ages will carry, as on the odoriferous wings of gentle gales, the sweet strains of

"That noble Chaucer, in those former times,

Who first enriched our English with his rhymes,
And was the first of ours that ever broke
Into the Muse's treasures, and first spoke
In mighty numbers; delving in the mine
Of perfect knowledge.'

RETROGRESSIVE PERIOD.

CHAPTER V.

FEATURES.

A brilliant sun enlivens the face of nature with an unusual lustre; the sudden appearance of cloudless skies, and the unexpected warmth of a tepid atmosphere, after the gloom and inclemencies of a tedious winter, fill our hearts with the visionary prospects of a speedy summer; and we fondly anticipate a long continuance of gentle gales and vernal serenity. But winter returns with redoubled horrors; the clouds condense more formidably than before; and those tender buds, and early blossoms, which were called forth by the transient gleam of a temporary sunshine, are nipped by frost and torn by tempests.-Warton.

Politics. After two and a half centuries of majestic rule, the dominion of the Plantagenets' proper passed away forever; and the House of Lancaster, in the person of Henry IV, was raised to the throne by a Parliamentary revolution. He bought the support of the Church by the promise of religious persecution, and that of the nobles by a renewal of the fatal French war. Henry V continued and almost realized the dream of an English empire in France, and his widow, contracting a second marriage with Owen Tudor, descendant of the Welsh princes, became the ancestress of another proud line of English sovereigns. The career of Henry VI was one of disaster in almost every variety,-factional strife at home, and calamity abroad. The Hundred Years' War ended, happily for mankind, with the expulsion of the English from French soil. Revolts of the populace were followed by a long and deadly struggle for supremacy between the parties of the red rose and the white, headed by two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty,―the Lancastrians and the Yorkists. After the violent crimes and excesses of Edward IV and Richard III, of the House of York-the one a despot and a sensualist, the other a usurper and a monster-when the illus

1 The heads of the line were Geoffrey of Anjou and Maud, daughter of Henry I of England. The name is derived from Planta Genista, Latin for the shrub which was worn as an emblem of humility by the first Earl of Anjou when a pilgrim of Holy Land. From this his successors took their crest and their surname.

trious barons were exterminated, or reduced to a shadow of their former greatness, the rival claims of the warring lines were united in the House of Tudor.

While the administration swerved continually into an irregular course, the restraint of Parliament grew more effectual, and notions of legal right acquired more precision, till the time of Henry VI, when the progress of constitutional liberty was arrested by the Wars of the Roses. To the restriction of suffrage succeeded the corruption of elections.' The baronage wrecked, the Crown towered into solitary greatness, and by its overpowering influence practically usurped the legislative functions of the two Houses. The interests of self-preservation led the churchman, the squire, and the burgess to lay freedom at the foot of the throne. Without a standing army, however, it is impossible to oppress, beyond a certain point, an armed people. Governors could safely be tyrants within the precinct of the court, but any general and long-continued despotism was prevented by the awe in which they stood of the temper and strength of the governed. From the accession of Henry VII is to be dated a new era, which, if less distinguished by the spirit of freedom, is more prosperous in the diffusion of opulence and the preservation of order.

Society.-Brutal as was the strife of the Roses, its effects were limited, in fact, to the great lords and their feudal retainers. The trading and industrial classes appear, for the most part, to have stood wholly aloof. It was of this period that Comines, an accomplished observer of his age, wrote:

'In my opinion, of all the countries in Europe where I was ever acquainted, the government is nowhere so well managed, the people nowhere less obnoxious to violence and oppression, nor their houses less liable to the desolations of war, than in England, for there the calamities fall only upon their authors.'

Elsewhere:

'England has this peculiar grace, that neither the country, nor the people, nor the houses are wasted, destroyed, or demolished; but the calamities and misfortunes of the war fall only upon the soldiers, and especially the nobility.' 2

Orders were frequently issued, previous to a battle, to slay the

1 The complaint of the men of Kent in Cade's revolt, 1450, alleges: "The people of the shire are not allowed to have their free election in the choosing of knights for the shire, but letters have been sent from divers estates to the great rulers of all the country, the which enforceth their tenants and other people by force to choose other persons than the common will is.'

2 The actual warfare in England from 1455 to 1485 included an aggregate space of about two years.