Which in white motley that so swote doth smell.
In all these lovely scenes there was a delicious sense of joyous existence; the inmates of the forest burst forth, from “the little conies, the beasts of gentle kind,” to “the dreadful roe and the buck,” and from their green leaves they who “with voice of angels” entranced the poet-musician—
| So loud they sang that all the woodés rung Like as it should shiver in pieces small, And as methought that the Nightingale With so great might her voice out-wrest, Right as her heart for love would brest (burst). |
So true is the accidental remark of the celebrated Charles Fox, that “of all poets Chaucer seems to have been the fondest of the singing of birds.” These were the peculiar delights in the poetic habits of Chaucer, who was an early riser, and often mused on many a rondel in gardens, and meads, and woods, at earliest dawn. This poet’s sun-risings are the most exhilarating in our poetry.
We may doubt if the vernal scenes of Chaucer can be partaken by his more chilly posterity. Did England in the seasons of Chaucer flourish with a more genial May and a more refulgent June? Or should we suspect that the travelled poet clothed our soil with the luxuriance of Provençal fancy, and borrowed the clear azure of Italy to soften the British roughness even of our skies?
Tyrwhit, the able commentator of Chaucer, has thrown out an incidental remark, which seems equally refined and true. “Chaucer in his serious pieces often follows his author with the servility of a mere translator; and in consequence his narration is jejune and constrained (as often appears in the “Romaunt of the Rose” and his translations of Dante), whereas in the comic he is generally satisfied with borrowing a slight hint of his subject, which he varies, enlarges, and embellishes at pleasure, and gives the whole the air and colour of an original; a sure sign that his genius rather led him to compositions of the latter kind.”
This remark is an instance of critical sagacity. The creative faculty in Chaucer had not broken forth in his translations, which evidently were his earliest writings. The native bent of his genius, the hilarity of his temper, betrays itself by playful strokes of raillery and concealed satire when least expected. His fine irony may have sometimes left his commendations, or even the objects of his admiration, in a very ambiguous condition. The learned editor of the second part of the “Paston Letters” hence has been induced to infer that the spirit of chivalry, from the reign of the third Edward, had entirely declined, and only existed in the forms of conventional and fashionable society, and had sunk into a mere foppery, a system of forms and etiquettes, because Chaucer, a court-poet, treats with irony the chivalric manners. Whether this ingenious inference will hold with literary antiquaries, I will not decide; but I am inclined to suspect that Chaucer’s indulgence of his taste for irony was not in the mind of this learned editor. Our poet has stamped with his immortal ridicule the tale told in his own person—“The Rime of Sir Thopas,” which is considered as a burlesque of the metrical romances. In those days there was an inundation of these romances, as “the thirst and hunger” of the present is accommodated with as spurious a brood. We have our “drafty prose” as they had their “drafty riming.” But shall we infer from this ludicrous effusion of the great poet, that he held so light the venerable fablers, the ancient romancers, with whose “better parts” he had nourished his own genius? This is his own confession. Often in his years of grief, when the poet wondered
| How he lived, for day ne night, I may not sleep— Sitting upright in my bed, |
then it was that he prescribed for his “secret sorrows” that medicine which, “drunk deeply,” makes us forget ourselves. In those hours the poet