Oriental origin, and it is happily blended with the romantic chivalry of the middle age. Every reader of true taste must regret that such a tale of high romance, so admirably begun, was left half told.'

The story of patient Griselda, which is related by the Clerke of Oxenford, is the last in the Decameron of Boccaccio. Chaucer however makes his clerke say,

I wolle you telle a tale which that I
Lernid at Padowe of a worthie clerke:-
Fraunceis Petrarke, the laureate poete,
whos rhetorike sweete

Enluminid Itaille of poetrie.

The fact is, that the Decameron falling into the hands of Petrarca not long before his death, he was so much struck with the tale of Griselda that he committed it to memory, and used to relate it to his friends. He afterwards made a free version of it into Latin, that he might delight those with it who were unacquainted with Italian. He mentions this to Boccaccio in one of his letters, and relates that one of his friends at Padua was so much affected on perusing the story that he burst into frequent and violent floods of tears, which prevented him from reading to the end. He adds that a Veronese, hearing of this, resolved to try whether it would affect him in like manner. He read the whole story aloud to the end, without changing his voice or altering his countenance; but on returning the book to Petrarca, he confessed that it was an affecting story, and said he should have wept, if like the Paduan he had thought the story true. But that he saw the whole was a fiction, and that there never was or ever will be such a wife as Griselda.

It is supposed, and not without foundation, that Chaucer may have been one of those favoured visitants of Petrarca, to whom, when the story was fresh in its impression upon him, he used to relate it.

Chaucer has not followed exactly either Boccaccio, or Petrarca's Latin version, but has amplified the story with more circumstantial detail.

This exquisitely pathetic narration soon acquired the popularity it richly merited, and the patience of its heroine became a proverbial phrase. In Chaucer's hands it lost none of its sentiment. It is of that kind (says Mr. Hazlitt) that heaves no sigh, that sheds no tear, but it hangs upon the beatings of the heart; it is part of the very being; it is as inseparable from it as the breath we draw. It is still and calm as the face of death. Nothing can touch its etherial purity: tender as the yielding flower, it is fixed as the marble firmament. The only remonstrance she makes, the only complaint against all the ill treatment she receives, is that single line where when turned back naked to her father's house, she says,

'Let me not like a worm go by the way.'

The story of the little child slain in Jewry (which is told by the Prioress, and which is worthy to be told by her who was 'all conscience and tender heart') is not less touching than that of Griselda. It is simple and heroic to the last degree.'

'The Cock and the Fox,' or 'The Tale of Nonnes Preest,' is full of admirable strokes of satire and character.

'The Wife of Bathes Prologue' Pope's version has made familiar to all readers of verse, and it may indeed be said that it is perhaps unrivaled as a comic story.'

January and May' is also from the same circumstance well known. It was probably selected by Pope as one of the best of Chaucer's comic tales; but Mr. Warton justly gives the preference to The Milleres Tale,' as possessing more true humour; the hendè Nicolas; the gay and gallant Absalom, the prince of parish clerks,

A merie child he was, so God me save.'

The fair, young wife and her dolt, the carpenter, are all of them delineations by the hand of a master.

It has been observed, that the licentiousness of some of the tales is not so much to be laid to the charge of the poet as to the grossness of the age in which he lived: the same apology has been made for the exceptionable passages in Shakspeare. Chaucer seems to have repented him of

and especially asks forgiveness, in the retractation attributed to him, for those tales that sounen unto sinne,' all which he revokes as 'worldly vanities,' and this is probably the cause why his great work was carried no further; for in the same curious document he beseeches all the saints in heaven that they will fro hensforth unto [his] lives ende, sende [him] grace to bewaile [his] giltes and to stodien to the savation of [his] soule.'

Although few particulars relating to Chaucer are to be gathered from his works, he has given us to understand that he was corpulent, and had a habit of looking on the ground: the reader's natural curiosity about the person of a writer whose works he is to peruse will make even these little traits acceptable to him.

-Our host to japen he began

And then at erst he looked upon me,

And said thus; What man art thou? quod he
Thou lookest as thou wouldest find a hare!

For ever upon the ground I see thee stare.
Approach near, and look up merrily.

Now ware you, sirs, and let this man have place;
He in the waist is shapen as well as I.
This were a puppet in arms to embrace
For any woman small and fair of face.
He seemeth elvish by his countenance,
For unto no wight doth he dalliance.'

These are part of the words of the Host to Chaucer, prefixed to The Rime of Sire Thopas.' It may be observed, that the good sense of Chaucer is apparent in this Rime, for he led the way to that admirable burlesque satire upon the old romances, which Cervantes afterwards so happily executed. Sire Thopas can be considered nothing less than an attempt to show the frivolous descriptions and tedious impertinencies' of the ancient metrical romances. He calls it ' a rime I learned yore agone,' and makes the host break out in angry impatience, weary of such absurdities,

'Now such a rime the devil I beteach

This may well be rime doggerel! quod he.'

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And upon this Chaucer consents to tell a littel thing in prose,' which is the 'moral tale vertuous' of Meliboeus.

We have also his own authority that he had great delight in reading, and that he gave the preference to old books: the passage is often cited for its truth. It is in the Assembly of Foules:'

⚫ Of usage what for lust, and what for lore,
On bookès read I oft, as I you told
But wherefore speak I all this?—not yore
Agone, it happed [me] to behold

Upon a book was ywritten with letters old,
And thereupon a certain thing to learn
The long day full fast I read and yern.

For out of the old fieldes, as men saith,
Cometh all this new corn fro year to year;
And out of old bookes, in good faith,
Cometh all this new science that men lere:
But now to purpose: as of this mattere
To read forth, it gan me so delight
That all that day methought it but a lite.'

But he was also a lover of the book of nature, and his many exquisite descriptions of rural scenery are

the result of frequent morning walks. In 'The Legend of Good Women' he tells us of the power of a May morning in withdrawing him from his books:

And as for me, though that I can but lite,
On bookes for to read I me delight,
And to hem give I faith and full credènce,
And in mine heart have hem in reverence
So heartily, that there is game none
That fro my bookes maketh me to gone,
But it be seldom, on the holy day;
Save, certainly, when that the month of May
Is comen, and that I hear the fowles sing,
And that the floures ginnen for to spring,
Farewell my book and my devotion.'

It is this enthusiastic love of rural sights and rural sounds' which enabled him to give such truth and reality to the scenes he describes.

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His genius was universal and adapted to themes of unbounded variety; his merit was not less in painting familiar manners with humour and propriety than in moving the passions, and in representing the beautiful or the grand objects of nature with grace and sublimity.'

Chaucer has been happily compared to a genial day in an English spring, after the gloom of a tedious winter;' enlivening the face of nature, and filling the heart with anticipations of vernal delight; after which winter returns with redoubled horrors, and nips those tender buds and blossoms the transient sunshine had prematurely called forth. The stormy reigns of five successive monarchs, comprehending the whole of the fifteenth century, were unpropitious to the developement of the fair flower, Poesy,' and the sunlight of this day of promise set,

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'Darkness again the age invades.'