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Poems of Chaucer's Middle Life.

36. Troylus and Cryseyde is a translation, though with many changes and many additions, of the Filostrato of Boccaccio. The original inventor of the story (of which no hint is found in Homer, nor in the Greek writers of the Lower Empire, Dares and Dictys, from whose pages Guido delle Colonne supplemented his Historia Trojana) was, according to M. Sandras, the AngloNorman trouvère, Benoit de Sainte-Maure. This author, a contemporary of Wace, before he wrote, by the commission of Henry II., his metrical history of the Dukes of Normandy, appears to have compiled a Geste de Troie, with the view of correcting the errors into which Homer had fallen, and giving the authentic history of the siege of Troy ! In this work, the sources of which appear to be but imperfectly known, the story of the loves of Troilus, son of Priam, and the faithless Chryseis, daughter of Chryses, the priest of Apollo, appears for the first time. Guido delle Colonne, a Sicilian lawyer of the thirteenth century, either copying Benoit, or using the unknown sources at which Benoit drew, reproduces the story in his Historia Trojana. From Guido, and possibly from Benoit also, it was borrowed by Boccaccio, and worked up into the elegant poem of Filostrato. But the character of Cressid is very differently drawn by Boccaccio and Chaucer. In the hands of the former she is a light and sensual woman, for whom it is impossible to feel respect or pity; such a Cressid, in short, as we have in Shakespeare's play. But 'Chaucer's Cryseyde is cast in a different mould. She possesses every quality which entitles a woman, not only to love, but to respect. Her delicacy is conspicuous; she is won with difficulty after a long courtship, carried on with consummate address under the direction of Pandarus; and is finally overcome by surprise. The moral beauty of her nature imparts a profound interest to her conduct, and we follow her through the gradual course of her infidelity with sorrow and compassion.'

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37. Chaucer speaks of Boccaccio by the pseudonym of Lollius, an historian of the third century. In the first book he calls him 'myn autour Lollius;' again in the fifth book near the end of the poem, he says, 'as telleth Lollius.' Lydgate also quotes Lollius as an author on Troy at the end of his Troy book ; again, in the House of Fame, Chaucer names him after Homer as an historian of Troy. Professor ten Brink, following out a

1 Quoted from Mr. Bell's able Introduction to Troylus and Cryseyde.

suggestion of Mr. Latham, conjectures that Chaucer may have misread his Horace (Epist. 1. ii. 1), and instead of

Trojani belli scriptorem, maxime Lolli,
Præneste relegi,

may have read :-

Trojani belli scriptorum maxime Lolli,
Præneste te legi—

'I have read thee at Præneste, O Lollius, greatest of the historians of the Trojan war.' This conjecture would be more admissible, were there any evidence that Chaucer was acquainted with Horace; but, so far as I know, he quotes him nowhere in his writings. On the whole, the supposition that Lollius Urbicus, mentioned in ancient lists of Latin authors as an historian of the third age, is the person intended, seems the most probable. But why Chaucer, who freely names Dante and Petrarch, to whom he was far less beholden, should have chosen to avoid all mention of Boccaccio, to whom he was so deeply indebted, remains an unsolved difficulty.

The Troylus is written in the Chaucerian heptastich, and is in five books. There is no certain indication of its date, but Lydgate vaguely speaks of it, in the prologue to his Falls of Princes, as a translation made in the poet's youth. But there is a marked increase of power as compared with the Romaunt, which may incline us to place it some ten or fifteen years farther on in the poet's life. The noble and eloquent close is worthy of all admiration. In the 'Envoye' at the end, he commends it to the correcting hands of his friends Gower and Strode :—

O moral Gower, this boke I directe

To the, and to the philosophical Strode,
To vouchensauf, ther nede is, to correcte,
Of youre benignites and zeles good.

38. The Court of Love is a poem of about 1,400 lines, written in the Chaucerian heptastich. The only MS. of it known to exist is one lately discovered at Cambridge; it is of the sixteenth century, and is perhaps the same as that used by Stowe, who first printed the poem in 1561. The versification is admirably musical; nowhere in his works has Chaucer written anything better in this respect. The poet, who describes himself as 'Philogenet, of Cambridge, clerk,'-a name which perhaps contains a modest allusion to Chaucer's connection, in virtue of his confidential position at court, with the royal house of Plantagenet, says that when he was eighteen years of age, Love compelled him to go on a pilgrimage to the

isle of Cythera to do homage to Venus. On reaching the island he finds that its government is in the hands of Admetus and Alceste, acting as viceroys for Venus

To whom obeyed the ladies good ninetene.

So, in the Legende, Alceste is attended by ladies ninetene.' Presently he espies a friend of his, the maiden Philobone 'chamberere unto the queen.' She acts as his guide, and brings him to the temple where Venus and Cupid preside. The god of Love chides him for having come so late to his court, and commands him to read the twenty statutes of love, and swear to observe them. This Philogenet does. The idea of these statutes is taken from the Roman de la Rose, but a cynical and immoral turn is given to some of them, of which the good Lorris would never have been guilty. After swearing to observe the statutes, Philogenet makes a long prayer to Venus, in the course of which he petitions that a lovely lady whom he had seen one night in a vision might be given to him as his love. The prayer is granted, and Rosial, in the description of whose beauty the poet draws largely on that with which Boccaccio in the Theseide celebrates the charms of Emilie, is revealed to his gaze. He makes his 'bille' to her, suing for her grace, and she after a time looks favourably on his suit. The poem ends with a profane parody, which has nothing to do with the thread of narrative, of the psalms sung at matins on Trinity Sunday, the birds taking up the chant in succession in praise of the god of Love. In other passages of the poem monks and nuns are introduced, deploring that they had too early committed themselves by vows to a renunciation of the service of Cupid. In appearance nothing can be laxer than the morality of the Court of Love; yet the gibes on austerity and the parodies on doctrine do not, in the mouth of Chaucer, mean all that they would mean in the mouth of a modern poet. He is exercising his poetical gift; appropriating and imitating all the witty things, bad and good, that he finds in the pages of his French and Italian compeers. The astonishing immorality of a great deal in the Decameron, recommended as it was by all the graces of style, then first attained by the prose of any modern language, is a parallel phenomenon to the cynicism of the Court of Love. Yet neither Chaucer nor Boccaccio lost his faith, as the 'Retractions' of the one, and the penitent end of the other, sufficiently demonstrate. It was not his intente,' as the fiend said of the poor carter; there was no full and deliberate intention of the will in either poet to depart from

1 The Freres Tale.

the precepts of God and the Church, so that each, culpable as had been too often the exercise of his pen, made a good end at last.

M. Sandras considers the Court of Love to be a very early work, but in this I cannot agree with him. The perfection of the verse seems to be more suitable to the ease and experience of a practised writer than to the rawness of a beginner. It is also worth noticing that the king of Love, when Philogenet is brought before him, is made to say :—

What doth this old,

Thus far ystope in yeres, come so late
Unto the court?-

as if the poet was here thinking of himself as he really was, forgetting that he had represented Philogenet, at the time of this adventure, as only eighteen years old. I should be disposed to place the poem between 1370 and 1380. With regard to Philogenet's being a clerk of Cambridge, it is by no means unlikely, as has been often pointed out, that Chaucer studied at both universities.

2,170 lines, in The first 'con

39. The House of Fame is a poem of about octosyllabic couplets, divided into three books. tains a dissertation on dreams analogous to the opening of the Roman de la Rose, an invocation of Sleep imitated from Machault, a reference to the tragical death of Croesus, as related by Jean de Meung, and a description of the temple of Venus, adorned with paintings which represent the different scenes of the Æneid. This long introduction ends with a vision borrowed from Dante.'1 As in the ninth canto of the Purgatorio, the poet sees before him an eagle with golden wings, dazzlingly bright. In the second part he is carried aloft by the eagle, and after a long aerial voyage brought to the House of Fame, a palace founded on a rock of ice. The third part tells us what he saw there. In the great hall he beholds the statues of the famous poets of old, Homer on a pillar of iron, Virgil on one of iron tinned over, Ovid on a pillar of copper, and Claudian on one of sulphur. He sees and describes crowds of people of every rank and calling, and then suddenly wakes up, and finds that it is all a dream :

Thus in dreming and in game

Endeth this lytel booke of Fame.

Many comic and satirical strokes are introduced throughout the poem; of which one might say in general, that while

1 Sandras, Étude, p. 118.

evidently suggested by the Divina Commedia, it substitutes the fantastic English humour and wealth of conception for the austere dignity and serious purpose of the great Italian. The House of Fame was modernised by Pope. It bears the evidence of a vast and discursive erudition, and should clearly be assigned to the middle period of Chaucer's life, of which it must be deemed the most important monument.

40. The Love of Palamon and Arcite appears, from the way in which it is mentioned in the Legende, to have been written some time before the latter work, but to have had little circulation. There can be no reasonable doubt that this is substantially the same composition with that which Chaucer has assigned to his Knight among the Canterbury Tales. It may therefore be passed over till we come to speak of that collection.

Chaucer's Later Poems.

41. In writing the Love of Palamon and Arcite, Chaucer must have perceived that the riming pentameter, or, as we now call it, the heroic couplet, which he then used for the first time, offered advantages for a continuous, serious, and dignified exposition or narrative, which neither any form of stanza, nor the short romance measure which he had used for the Romaunt and the House of Fame, could justly pretend to. This conviction, we may suppose, led him to choose this metre for the Legende of Goode Women, and afterwards for many of the Canterbury Tales.

42. The Legende is a poem of about 2,600 lines, and is extant in numerous MSS. The name is perhaps derived from the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voraigne, which is a collection of the lives of saints. For in pursuance of the mocking parody which we witnessed in the Court of Love, though in a milder and less cynical temper, the poet still assimilates the service of Christ to the service of Cupid, and celebrates the nine ladies here held up for imitation as the saints and martyrs of Love.

The opening of the Legende is very beautiful. The poet tells us how, when May comes round, he leaves his books and his devotion, and goes abroad into the fields to do honour and obeisance to the Daisy, that 'floure of floures alle.' On such an occasion, after returning to his house he fell asleep in an arbour, and dreamed that he saw the god of Love with Alceste, and nineteen ladies in her train. Love charges him with having written many things in the dispraise of women, and

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