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to the profanity with which the Host has ornamented his request

"The Persone him answerde, 'benedicite!'

What eyleth the man so sinfully to swere?"

Instead of a tale from the priest we now have one from the Shipman; then the Prioress tells the miraculous story of Hugh of Lincoln, the little martyr, who, after his throat had been cut and his body thrown into a pit, sweetly sings O Alma Redemptoris.

One of the most interesting episodes follows the tale of the Prioress. The Host turns to Chaucer himself

"And seyde thus, 'what man artow?'* quod he;
'Thou lokest as thou woldest finde an hare,

For ever upon the ground I see the stare.""

Like the Host, we expect Chaucer to surpass all the rest in his story-telling. But Chaucer, either from modesty or from a keen sense of the humorous, inflicts the company with the Tale of Sir Thopas, a bit of doggerel that provokes the Host, after over two hundred lines have been recited, to interrupt with

"No more of this, for goddes dignitee,"

Chaucer accepts the interruption in good grace and then tells in prose the Tale of Melibeus, a dull story translated from the French.

So the stories run on, with here and there an interruption or interlude to keep us informed of the progress of the pilgrims as they journey to Canterbury. Among the best that follow are those by the Nun's Priest, the Wife of Bath, and the Clerk.

The England of Chaucer. - Chaucer's England, the England of more than five hundred years ago, in manners, customs, social usages, commerce, national activities, and national consciousness, was a very different England from that of today. But it was by no means an inert and decadent England, for sane and vigorous poetry, such as Chaucer's, does not flourish in periods of

* art thou

national stagnation. To the alert mind of that time the great world-movements in commerce, government, and religion furnished that stimulus which is needed for the development of a full personality. Chaucer's life was

"co-eval with the brilliant reign of Edward III and its inglorious close; with Cressy and Poictiers; with the terrible ravages of the Black Death; with the premonitory throes of the Protestant Reformation; ... with the great insurrection of the peasantry; and with the deposition of Richard II.”*

It was the age of the Black Prince, of John of Gaunt, of Bolingbroke, of Prince Hal, and of that imaginary character, Shakspere's greatest comic creation - Falstaff; the age of the vision of Piers the Plowman; of John Wiclif, the reformer and translator of the Bible. While not so spectacular in conquest nor so brilliant in literature as the unparalleled Elizabethan period with its Spanish Armada and its Shakspere, it was nevertheless an age of tremendous import in the development of English nationality.

Among the most significant movements was the drift towards the literary use of the English language. With the coming of William the Conqueror had come the use of the French language. English was the language of the conquered; the church and the court used Latin and French; consequently the vernacular became a despised tongue. But the common people kept on using their native speech, and gradually the conquered overcame the conquerors. For a century or more the political and social separation of France and England had been going on; Frenchmen were told to consider France their country, while Englishmen would give allegiance to England alone. Chaucer's use of English is but part of a general movement towards the widespread adoption of the vernacular for all purposes. Wiclif reached the common people by his translation of the Bible into a language that could be understood by the layman. The speech of the aristocratic knight and the learned priest gave way to the speech of the common people.

* Green.

"Let clerks indite in Latin [writes the author of the Testament of Love], and the Frenchmen in their French also indite their quaint terms, for it is kindly to their mouths; and let us show our fantasies in such words as we learned of our mother's tongue."

To mark the exact time when medievalism ceases and modern history begins is an impossibility; but we may characterize the fourteenth century as the transition period, the time when the medieval and the modern spirit are coming into conflict. The spirit of medievalism fostered socialism, monasteries, monarchies, and one Papal center; the new spirit, the Renaissance, encouraged individualism, Protestantism, and democracy. Mr. Root in his The Poetry of Chaucer, while discussing medievalism and the Renaissance, writes:

"The fundamental distinction, I think, lies in the fact that the medieval mind has its gaze fixed on the spiritual and abstract, that of the Renaissance on the sensuous and concrete. 'Medievalism proclaims that the eternal things of the spirit are alone worth while; the Renaissance declares that a man's life consists, if not in the abundance of the things he possesses, at any rate in the abundance and variety of sensations he enjoys.'"

Dante may be given as an illustration of the spirit of medievalism, and Shakspere as the representative of the modern spirit. Chaucer, with his pictures of real men and women, is of the type of Shakspere.

The Learning of Chaucer.-Is Chaucer a learned poet? For many years this question was answered with a decided affirmative, but modern scholarship hesitates to call him learned, though in denying this attribute no disparagement of his poetic quality is intended, for learning and creative poetic genius may have little in common. However, his early biographers placed no limit to his profound and comprehensive learning. Leland tells us that Chaucer left the university a logician, orator, poet, philosopher, and mathematician; and, as if this were not sufficient glory, adds that he was also a devout theologian.

“To attain eminence in any one of these departments of study is of itself sufficient to confer immortality upon most men. According to his earliest biographers, Chaucer attained eminence in them all."

Although even Milton calls him "our learned Chaucer," his learning is rather a matter of unfounded tradition than of fact. Compared with the lay ignorance of his time, he was learned, but not in the sense in which Milton himself was a learned man. Chaucer lived at a time when "a great scholar was expected to know not merely something of everything, but everything of everything." This ideal may be at least as rational as the modern theory which with its emphasis on technical specialization has a tendency to produce "intensive knowledge of one thing with extensive ignorance of everything," but it does not yield the first requisite of scholarship-accuracy. That Chaucer is lacking in accuracy is proved by the internal testimony of his own extensive compositions.

But we must not infer that Chaucer was unacquainted with the learning of his age. Latin and French were known to all educated men of his time. In addition to these he also knew Italian; but his knowledge was that of the man of letters, of the artist who reads for pleasure, for a study of the art of the writer, and for insight into life. The French writers whom he knew are now forgotten, save by the specialist in literature, but the Italian are the great names of Petrarch, Dante, and Boccaccio. Of these three he was most familiar with Boccaccio; with his poetry rather than with his prose. Mr. Lounsbury places himself on record as believing that there is "not a particle of evidence that Chaucer had ever seen or read a line of the Decameron." Nor is there any foundation for the report that the Canterbury Tales is founded upon the plan of the Decameron. This collection appeared in 1353, but, as books traveled slowly in those days, Chaucer may never have seen Boccaccio's prose masterpiece. As Boccaccio's name is never mentioned in Chaucer's writings, it is the opinion of some critics that Chaucer knew the writings but did not know anything of the author.

Chaucer had some acquaintance with the writings of Dante, but not such extensive acquaintance as has been attributed to him by Dantean scholars. The Canterbury Tales contains but three references. In Troilus and Criseyde occur three lines

reminding us of that passage in Dante which Tennyson has made familiar through his Locksley Hall

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That a sorrow's crown of sorrows is remembering happier things.”

Chaucer's version is,

"For of Fortune's sharp adversity,

The worste kind of infortune is this,
A man to have been in prosperity,
And it remember when it passed is."

But as Dante likely followed Boethius, and as Chaucer was more familiar with Boethius than with Dante, it is hardly fair to cite this passage as an illustration of Chaucer's acquaintance with Dante.

Critics such as Ten Brink and Skeat think that The House of Fame is the poem showing the strongest traces of Dante's influence, but Lounsbury thinks his whole indebtedness cannot exceed twenty lines.

Chaucer's acquaintance with ancient writers ranges from the familiar names of Vergil, Ovid, Horace, and Juvenal to the less known Florus, Valerius Maximus, and Macrobius. He names Cicero but twice, and Livy but five times and then always in connection with the same story from Livy. He had read the legends connected with the great centers of heroic deeds Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, King Arthur, and above all, with the Trojan War, with the events of which he seems to be thoroughly familiar..

Views on Religion. It is hard to draw a correct inference from his writings as to just what his views on religion were. The time in which he lived was not conducive to open-mindedness and free expression. Even today in some communities there is little tolerance of free discussion of religious topics. In Chaucer's day the path of free expression was beset with many pitfalls. Some have said that he was a follower of Wiclif, because he ridicules the foibles of the monks and exposes the hypocrisies of the priests. But this is no proof, for Langland and Gower, who

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