Timor Mortis conturbat me
shows a sense of the transitoriness of all earthly pleasure.
Enough has already been said to show that the influences that moulded sixteenth-century literature in England were not such as to lead its poets to model themselves on Chaucer. In the Golden Targe, Dunbar gives expression to the popular view of Chaucer in his day:—
O reverend Chaucer, rose of rethoris[226] all,
As in our tongue a flower imperial,
That rose in Britain ever, who readeth right,
Thou bear’st, of makers[227] the triumph royal;
Thy fresh enamelled termes celestial
This matter could illumined have full bright,
Wert thou not of our English all the light,
Surmounting every tongue terrestrial
As far as Mayes morrow doth midnight?
And here again, as in Occleve, we see that it is for his language rather than for his invention that the poet is praised. But the sixteenth century saw the change from Middle English to Modern, a change which, for the time being, lost men the key to Chaucer’s verse. Old inflections had gradually dropped off, the accented “e” which ends so many of Chaucer’s words had become mute, and the result was that the poets of the new age found Chaucer’s lines impossible to scan. A generation whose taste was formed on Classical and Italian models, whose precisians urged the necessity of discarding “bald and beggarly rhymning” in favour of the classical system of accent, had not patience enough to rediscover the laws that governed Chaucer’s verse. It says much for the insight and genuine poetic taste of Elizabethan critics that they one and all speak of Chaucer with admiration and respect. Fresh editions of his works continued to appear at frequent intervals throughout the century, and frequent references to his name show that they were well known to the poets of the period. To Spenser he is “The God of shepheards”:—
Who taught me homely, as I can, to make.
He, whilst he lived, was the soueraigne head
Of shepheards all, that been with loue ytake;
and he goes on to protest that
... all hys passing skil with him is fledde,
The fame whereof doth dayly greater growe.
The famous reference in the Faerie Queene to
Dan Chaucer, well of Englishe undefyled,
On Fames eternal beadroll worthie to be fyled,