Say that she fixes on a lower sphere, The translation is Campbell's. Though he was constant, until her death as a middle-aged matron, to the person about whom it pleased him to weave his ideal web, in Petrarch's verse the expression of his patriotism is nobler than the ingenious and musical expression of unreal love. He sees the foreigner on native soil, and cries, of one heart with the patriots of half a thousand years later, Or, as Lady Dacre rendered this part of the appeal to the princes of Italy: Nor long shall doubtful hang the unequal fight; For no,-the ancient flame Is not extinguished yet that raised the Italian name." The fire of the poet is almost extinguished in the translation; but it leaped high, and it still animates his country. There was in Petrarch, whose verse represents the perfection of Italian style, full measure of the earnestness that gives to a true poet permanence of fame. Truth, subtly expressed, lives in many an immortal line even of the most conceited of his Platonic love sonnets. But it was not for his patriotism or for his truth that he was made a darling poet of his age. What the troubadours had begun, he perfected. Of the two forms of his verse, he derived one-the sonnet-from the Sicilians; the other-the canzone-from the Provençals. The recital of his verses from town to town clothed ragged men in silks, while Petrarch tells us that even the very shoemakers began to celebrate their loves in emulative rhyme. Boccaccio In 1359 Dante had been dead eight-and-thirty years. Boccaccio, then a sobering man of forty-six, ten years after he had written his "Decameron," talked theology at Florence with Petrarch, nine years his senior. As Petrarch did not possess among his manuscript books the "Divine Comedy" of Dante, Boccaccio-appointed at Florence first of a line of professors to expound that poem and to glorify its authorgave him a copy, which was acknowledged in a letter from which one passage, although often quoted, is worth repetition : 66 Gladly do I seize this opportunity of confuting the charge made against me by my enemies of hating this great poet. Why should I hate him? I never saw him but once, or rather he was shown to me, and that in my childhood. He lived with my father and grandfather, older than the former, younger than the latter, and the same storm drove them all the same day from their country. This similarity of fortune, joined by a union of tastes, united him in strict friendship with my father; but they took opposite courses: my father yielded to circumstances, and occupied himself with the care of his family; Dante, on the contrary, resisted them, and resolutely followed the path he had taken, thinking only of glory, and resigning everything for it. Neither the injustice of his countrymen, nor private quarrels, nor exile, nor poverty, nor love of children or wife, -nothing could distract him from his studies, though poetry demands so much quiet and repose." The seven imaginary ladies and three gentlemen whom Boccaccio supposed to shut out the horrors of the great plague of Florence in 1348, by enjoying themselves in a garden with a ten-day feast of story-telling, presented--in the best and easiest, though nearly the first, Italian proseamong their hundred tales the choice tales of the day from the French fabliaux, from incidents of actual life, or from whatever source was open to the author. Even the machinery in which the tales are set came from the East, and had existed in a Latin form two centuries before. The number of the stories also was perhaps determined by the previous existence of the "Cento Novelle Antiche." Boccaccio wrote to amuse the ladies, little prizing what he esteemed as his light labour in the vulgar tongue. But Petrarch's love-poetry was not more to the taste of the day than Boccaccio's tales; the very tales of the time, in the temper and manner of the time, perfectly expressed. Collections of stories linked together by the incidents of a slight containing narrative, multiplied rapidly. Chaucer's masterpiece, which includes some of the "Decameron" tales, was written upon the plan thus established, some thirty years after the "Decameron." Chaucer, born seven years after the death of Dante, was twenty-four years younger than Petrarch— "Fraunceis Petrark the laureat poete, Highte this clerk, whos rethorike swete ence on Chaucer. The native and the foreign elements in Chaucer's verse. from whom he says that his Clerke took the Tale of the patient Griselda; and he was fifteen years younger than Boccaccio, from whose "Teseide" he took the Italian influKnight's Tale of Palamon and Arcite, from whose "Filostrato" he took his Troilus and Cressida, and with whose "Decameron" his Canterbury Tales have in common the Tales of the Reve, the Franklin, and the Shipman, all of which existed also among the store of French lays and fabliaux open alike to the Italian and the English poet. The complete inertness of the mere conceits of sonnet or canzone on the English mind of Chaucer is worth noting. As translator of the "Romaunt of the Rose," he recognised and shared the taste for mystical allegory. But his mind, like that of his countrymen, fastened on a poetry instinct with life and dramatic action. His wholesome sense of the ridiculous caused him to round with a shrewd English humour all the sentimental corners even of the tale of Griselda, thereby humanising it into a more sterling poetry, and doubling the force of its pathos. The influence of the French rhymers and story-tellers, and of the new classical force given in Italy by the great founders of modern literature, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to the vulgar tongue of the land in which, of all others, the Latin had a right to be retained as its own classical language, we may trace everywhere in Chaucer; but all is digested, and serves only to feed the vigour of a most genuinely English mind. The religious heart of this country also, and its resentment of corruption and injustice both in Church and State, represented in great part by Wyclif, spoke through our great poets, and was as real in Chaucer's jests upon the greed and false pretension of the monks, and in his ideal sketch of the good Town Parson, as in the religious allegory by which the author of "The Vision of Piers Plowman" looked through the griefs of a bewildered and misguided people to the divine simplicities of Christian truth. The disastrous glories of the reign of Henry V., and the still more disastrous period of the ensuing Wars of the Roses, checked the advance of our literature. Lydgate, in the fifteenth century, turned stories from Latin and Italian collections, from French fabHe enforced Dark days of English Literature. liaux and Church legends, into prolix verse. the morals a good monk would labour to uphold, but not without admixture of the English satirical spirit, which attacked chiefly the lawyers as a class that had then taken profitable employments out of the hands of the clergy, and the women, who were in those days not more subject to a refinement of conceited praise than to the coarseness of the most damnatory jesting. Stephen Hawes's "Pastime of Pleasure" continued on French inspiration the allegorical school of romantic verse, in the style of the "Romaunt of the Rose," into the reign of Henry VII. Here the Prince Graunde Amour resolves to become worthy of La Bel Pucell by studies in the Tower of Doctrine. He is taught there by Lady Grammar and her sisters Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, and Music, passes to the Towers of Geometry and Chivalry, then, being made a knight, goes forth to seek adventures; is deceived by the dwarf False Report, kills a giant with three heads called Imagination, Falsehood, and Perjury, marries his lady, and is happy until made prisoner by Age, who gives him Avarice and Policy for companions; he is slain by Death, buried by Mercy, and has his epitaph written by Remembrance. With Hawes we travel upon one road to the "Faery Queen." During this long period of English social depression, by far the best part of our imaginative literature was that which the bright spirits among the people who must still be amused with songs and stories struck out for themselves, by telling the King Arthur romances and other metrical tales in plain |