that we are unwilling to be angry. Laughter is wholesome, and the malignant spirits of irreverence, the impure spirits of unseemly jesting, are in a measure exorcised by it. As malarious vapor rapidly disappears under the open sky, and requires to be confined in a chamber, or shut up in a close court, to become deadly, so vice, held within a vicious. heart, is tenfold pestilential, and shoots out through the bitter word, like a scalding jet of steam. With Chaucer, vulgarity lay under the broad heavens, an offensive fact indeed, but one with which he had no more to do than another. He chose to laugh, others might run away and hide, if they pleased. So much perhaps may be fairly said in extenuation; yet these low, sensual features remain, a thing of bad significance. One needs to know the moral constitution of the recipient, or he may breathe pestilence in this atmosphere. If one goes to Chaucer for pleasure, he eats honey from the carcase of a lion; while he feeds one sense, he may have occasion to close others. Yet with all we acquit him of the lasciviousness of later periods.

While society is the chosen theme of Chaucer, he has a kindly love of nature. He treats of it without analysis and without interpretation; but with a quick perception of its pleasant, cheerful, aspects. Thus he speaks of the morning in the Squiere's Tale:

The vapour, which that fro the erthe glode,
Maketh the sonne to seme rody and brode:
But natheles, it was so faire a sight,
That it made all hir hertes for to light,
What for the seson, and the morwening,
And for the foules that she herde sing.
For right anon she wiste what they ment,
Right by hir song, and knew al hir intent.

An exterior appreciation of the good and beauty of the world is the first spontaneous tribute of the poetic spirit to nature, an analytic, penetrative and spiritual interpretation of it belongs to a period of more reflection.

From these characteristics of Chaucer, his national and progressive temper, his strong sympathies with men, his sense of the abuses under which they suffered, and his good-will to them, we see that he felt appreciatively the moral forces of his age, and that his genius ripened under them, both in the direction and form of his labors. He was not, it is true, a reformer; artists as artists are rarely, if ever So. An urgent, cogent, ethical sentiment eats a man up, gives the soul an intensity and velocity that are sublime, perhaps, but not beautiful. The true poet of a period feels the moral elements at work about him, but is not driven by them. sufficiently free to treat them artistically, æsthetically, appreciatively, with something of the patience and sufferance we find in nature, in the imperturbable tarrying of Divine Providence till events ripen. He has little of the haste, struggle, fierceness, overestimates of reform. There is an affection in him for the present and the past, a catholic appreciation

He is left

of their beauties, an eye for their inner embryonic forces, which make him less headstrong in change, less confident of its results. He uses the ethical light that is in him not so much to cast deep shadows on the sins of the hour, as to bring out in bright relief its virtues, and to make each declining sun shed long beams of promise on the horizon, assuring us that the days hold each other and unfold. each other with one continuous triumphant force. The great poet feels the ethical temper and working of his time, as one who tarries in the sunlight, not as one who works in it; as one who enjoys it, rather than as one who is put to speed under it. Without a wakeful consciousness to moral elements, the mind is left opaque and feeble; fiercely stimulated by them, it is thrown into discipleship, and achieves an epic, rather than writes one; simply translucent and receptive under them, it breaks their solid beams into brilliant lines of color.

Chaucer, like most men of unusual powers, gained the appreciation that has fallen to him somewhat slowly. It is by some thought that in the esteem of his own times, and of those immediately subsequent, he scarcely surpassed Gower, of whom Lowell has said, “Our literature had to lie by and recruit for more than four centuries ere it could give us an equal vacuity in Tupper, so persistent a uniformity of commonplace in the Recreations of a Country Parson.”*

Having thus presented the forces at work in the last half of the fourteenth century, and the

*My Study Windows, p. 260.

height to which genius carried them, we turn to the interregnum of English literature, the fifteenth century and the earlier portion of the sixteenth. This may be called the retrogressive period, and so separated the times which preceded from those which followed it, that the problem of progress was taken up almost anew at a later date. Not only was nothing added to the ground gained in the fourteenth century, the genius of that period suffered eclipse, and was not disclosed again for two centuries. In Scotland, indeed, a literature more nearly corresponding to that of the fourteenth century in England found place in the fifteenth, and the deferred dawn of letters appeared in the north, with less brilliancy, under Dunbar and his associates.

A chief reason for this barrenness of the fifteenth century was the stern repression which met all free inquiry. "The University of Oxford chose twelve of its members to examine the writings of Wicliffe, and the report made presented two hundred and sixty-seven opinions which were described as worth of fire." So voluminous and hot a censure did this university, and with it all England, pass on him who first brought to it bold, free thought, and religious emancipation. Severe measures were set on foot; the reformation, as a forest conflagration, was extinguished. It was not, however, completely trampled out; it sank into the soil, ran along the low ground, and smouldered in various places as the intelligence or independence of the common people gave it opportunity. The

* Revolutions in English History, vol. i. p. 590.

hold which the new doctrines maintained on the popular mind is shown in a work entitled, The Lantern of Light, a fearless exposure of religious corruption; and in the martyrdom. of Claydon at Smithfield. The reaction in the church, however, was so complete, that its upper orders became more than ever luxurious and licentious, its lower orders increasingly dissolute; both uniting to suppress the present movement, and to provoke a new one more thorough and irresistible.

The cause of religious liberty was identified, as it always must be, with that of intellectual freedom. Learning declined, especially at Oxford, and her scholars, through the poverty of her foundations, became "travelling mendicants," treated, at times, with the utmost indignity. Herein is a first and sufficient reason for the literary feebleness of the period. The bold proffer of life that was made it had been rejected, and the reactionary influences of vice, ignorance and superstition were in the ascendant.

A second, confirmatory force were the civil wars, which raged in the latter portion of the century. They involved little or no principle, were ambitious struggles for power, carried lawless violence everywhere, and were thus thoroughly opposed to the peaceful and enlightened arts. The immediate influence of these wars of succession was almost wholly evil, though they tended at length to consolidate and strengthen society and government. This civil strife was greatly aided by the comparative independence and power of the nobles. Many