Chaucer's merits as a poet are great and various, but they are all inferior to his power of delineating living character. His landscapes are pleasant ; his feasts and tournaments are picturesque ; but his men and women are not inferior even to Shakspeare's in comic spirit and resemblance to nature. Ile is sometimes pathetic, and \\Talton gives an instance of his sublimity, but the pas sage is chiefly borrowed from Statics, and is mixed with much incongruous matter. After such terrific images as " The slayer of himself yet saw I there, His heartis blood }'bathed had his hair ;' after " \Voodnesse laughing in her rage ;" after e xhibit ing the burning of sli:ps, and the desolation of he introduces the " e (Joke scalded for all his lunge ladle." But Ci.auccr lived when taste was in its childhood.
Ile was the great architect of our versification. I le understood the genius or his native language, and adapt ed it to these still( tuns of rhyme, which some •himsi cal proje•tors in the age of Queen Elizabeth would have demolished, in older to substitute a Latin form, but which Spenser in his In•tic r judgment followed and int proved.• A groundless objection was made to his sty he by an old critic, that he introduced cartloads of French words into our language. It is a satisfactory answer to this, that the language of England in his time was deep ly intermixed with French. In the reign of Edward the
Third, French and English were taught together at schools; and it was usual to make the scholars construe their Latin into French. A Norman-Saxon dialect must have been in fact the accustomed language of the upper classes, and it was to them that Chaucer wrote. Spenser thought differently of his style from the critic to whom WC have alluded, when he pronounced it the " Ira/ of EngliNh wick/I/ed." The fluctuation of language easily accounts for this being less strictly true at present than 200 years ago. In general his words in a single sentence clearly reach the meaning to which they point, and he is only fatiguing because he multiplies sentences, and spins out descriptions. This, however, like the coarse part of his humour, was more the fault of his age than of him self. While the beauties of style in more refined classics meet and surprise us at every turn, those of Chaucer may be compared to flowers which we collect in a long journey, numerous in the sum, but collected widely asunder. This expression may appear irreverend to those who are enamoured of old English and obsolete spelling, merely because it is old and obsolete ; but the reader who sits down to Chaucer, expecting wonders in every page, will find, that though there is much to re ward his patience, there is also something to exercise it. (n)