vindicates Chaucer from the imputation of leaving English more full of French than he found it, considers it impossible to ascertain, with any degree of certainty, the exact changes which he produced upon the national style, as we have neither a regular series of authors preceding him, nor authentic copies of their works, nor assurance that they were held as standards by their contemporaries. In spite of this difficulty, Mr. Ellis ventures to consider Chaucer as distinguished from his predecessors by his fondness for an Italian inflexion of words, and by his imitating the characteristics of the poetry of that nation.

He has a double claim to rank as the founder of English poetry, from having been the first to make it the vehicle of spirited representations of life and native manners, and from having been the first great architect of our versification, in giving our language the ten syllable, or heroic measure, which, though it may sometimes be found among the lines of more ancient versifiers, evidently comes in only by accident. This measure occurs in the earliest poem that is attributed to him1, The Court of Love, a title borrowed from the fantastic institutions of that name, where points of casuistry in the tender passion were debated and decided by persons of both sexes. It is a dream, in which the poet fancies himself taken to the Temple of Love, introduced to a mistress, and sworn to observe the statutes of the amatory god.

1 Written, as some lines in the piece import, at the age of nineteen.

As the earliest work of Chaucer, it interestingly exhibits the successful effort of his youthful hand in erecting a new and stately fabric of English numbers. As a piece of fancy, it is grotesque and meager; but the lines often flow with great harmony.

His story of Troilus and Cresseide was the delight of Sir Philip Sydney; and perhaps, excepting the Canterbury Tales, was, down to the time of Queen Elizabeth, the most popular poem in the English language. It is a story of vast length and almost desolate simplicity, and abounds in all those glorious anachronisms which were then, and so long after, permitted to romantic poetry: such as making the son of King Priam read the Thebais of Statius, and the gentlemen of Troy converse about the devil, justs and tournaments, bishops, parliaments, and scholastic divinity.

The languor of the story is, however, relieved by many touches of pathetic beauty. The confession of Cresseide in the scene of felicity, when the poet compares her to the "new abashed nightingale, that stinteth first ere she beginneth sing," is a fine passage, deservedly noticed by Warton. The grief of Troilus after the departure of Cresseide is strongly portrayed in Troilus's soliloquy in his bed.

"Where is mine owne ladie, lief, and dere? Where is her white brest-where is it-where ? Where been her armès, and her iyen clere, That yesterday this time with me were ?

Now may I wepe alone with many a teare,
And graspe about I may; but in this place,
Save a pillòwe, I find nought to embrace.

The sensations of Troilus, on coming to the house of his faithless Cresseide, when, instead of finding her returned, he beholds the barred doors and shut windows, giving tokens of her absence, as well as his precipitate departure from the distracting scene, are equally well described.

Therwith whan he was ware, and gan behold
How shet1 was every window of the place,
As frost him thought his hertè gan to cold,
For which, with changed deedly palè face,
Withouten worde, he for by gan to pace,
And, as God would, he gan so fastè ride,
That no man his continuance espied.
Than said he thus: O paleis desolate,
O house of houses, whilom best yhight,
O paleis empty and disconsolate,

O thou lanterne of which queint 2 is the light,
O paleis whilom day, that now art night;
Wel oughtest thou to fall and I to die,
Sens she is went, that wont was us to gie*.

The two best of Chaucer's allegories, The Flower and the Leaf, and The House of Fame, have been fortunately perpetuated in our language; the former 3 Since. 4 To make joyous.

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by Dryden, the latter by Pope. The Flower and the Leaf is an exquisite piece of fairy fancy. With a moral that is just sufficient to apologize for a dream, and yet which sits so lightly on the story as not to abridge its most visionary parts, there is, in the whole scenery and objects of the poem, an air of wonder and sweetness; an easy and surprising transition that is truly magical. Pope had not so enchanting a subject in The House of Fame; yet, with deference to Warton, that critic has done Pope injustice in assimilating his imitations of Chaucer to the modern ornaments in Westminster Abbey, which impair the solemn effect of the ancient building. The many absurd and fantastic particulars in Chaucer's House of Fame will not suffer us to compare it, as a structure in poetry, with so noble a pile as Westminster Abbey in architecture. Much of Chaucer's fantastic matter has been judiciously omitted by Pope, who at the same time has clothed the best ideas of the old poem in spirited numbers and expression. Chaucer supposes himself to be snatched up to heaven by a large eagle, who addresses him in the name of St. James and the Virgin Mary, and, in order to quiet the poet's fears of being carried up to Jupiter, like another Ganymede, or turned into a star like Orion, tells him, that Jove wishes him to sing of other subjects than love and blind Cupido,' and has therefore ordered, that Dan Chaucer should be brought to behold the House of Fame. In Pope, the philosophy of fame comes with much more propriety from

the poet himself, than from the beak of a talkative eagle.

It was not until his green old age that Chaucer put forth, in the Canterbury Tales, the full variety of his genius, and the pathos and romance, as well as the playfulness of fiction. In the serious part of those tales he is, in general, more deeply indebted to preceding materials, than in the comic stories, which he raised upon slight hints to the air and spirit of originals. The design of the whole work is after Boccaccio's Decamerone; but exceedingly improved. The Italian novelist's ladies and gentlemen, who have retired from the city of Florence, on account of the plague, and who agree to pass their time in telling stories, have neither interest nor variety in their individual characters; the time assigned to their congress is arbitrary, and it evidently breaks up because the author's stores are exhausted. Chaucer's design, on the other hand, though it is left unfinished, has definite boundaries, and incidents to keep alive our curiosity, independent of the tales themselves. At the same time, while the action of the poem is an event too simple to divert the attention altogether from the pilgrims' stories, the pilgrimage itself is an occasion sufficiently important to draw together almost all the varieties of existing society, from the knight to the artisan, who, agreeably to the old simple manners, assemble in the same room of the hostellerie. The enumeration of those characters in the Prologue forms a scene, full,