the spirit of military enterprise, fomented by religious enthusiasm, and a fantastic devotion to the fair sex, produced the system called Chivalry, and led to those gallant but unfortunate expeditions, the Crusades, which had for their object the rescue of the Holy Land from the dominion of the Saracens. A considerable number of the productions of the minstrels have been handed down in manuscript to modern times; and their manner of writing has been in some measure revived by Sir Walter Scott, and several other authors of the present age. The Provençal poetry produced a greater or less effect in almost all civilized countries. In Italy, during the early part of the fourteenth century, it awakened the genius of Dante and Petrarch, who were the first to produce the sentimental and systematic poetry which has ever since been so considerable a department of European literature. Dante wrote chiefly in an allegorical style; that is to say, he described all kinds of abstract ideas under the semblance of things real and tangible. Petrarch, on the other hand, wrote amatory poetry with wonderful delicacy. There was another Italian writer, Boccaccio, who flourished a little later, and composed a series of entertaining stories in prose, which bears the general title of the Decameron. It is necessary to observe these things carefully, for English poetry was, in its origin, greatly affected by them. The impulse that was felt in England manifested itself in the poetic effusions of Lawrence Minot, Langlande, and Gower. The works of Minot were first discovered in the Cottonian library in 1795. They consisted of battle songs. Langlande wrote the Visions of Pierce Plowman, a poem in twenty parts, reflecting severely on the various professions of life, and particularly hostile to the clergy. Gower made some advances in English poetry on all who went before him, but still, like his predecessors, rather prepared the way for song, than exhibited genuine examples of it. His principal piece was Confessio Amantis. He inveighed against the vices and follies of the age. * Contemporary with Petrarch, and not long after the time of Dante, arose GEOFFRY CHAUCER, who is allowed to be the father of genuine English poetry. He flour be ished at the courts of Edward III. and Richard II., tween the years 1360 and 1400, and not only possessed an original genius of the first order, but had improved himself by travel, and by all the learning of the times. Despising alike the dull old rhyming chroniclers, and the more lively minstrels, he aimed at writing after the regular manner of the three illustrious Italians just mentioned, taking allegory from Dante, tenderness from Petrarch, and humorous anecdote from Boccaccio. He was himself a shrewd observer of character and manners, and seems to have been well acquainted with the world, such as it was in his own time. His chief work is that called the Canterbury Tales, which consists of a series of sportive and pathetic narratives, related by a miscellaneous company in the course of a religious pilgrimage to Canterbury. The work opens with a description of the company setting out from the Tabard Inn in Southwark, and a minute account of the persons and the characters of the various pilgrims, who are nearly thirty in number. These characteristic sketches are in themselves allowed to display uncommon talent, so distinct is every one from the other, and so vividly are all presented to the mind of the reader. The Knight, the Yeoman, the Prioress, the Monk, the Merchant, the Lawyer, the Miller-all are exact and recognizable portraits.* The tales told by the Canterbury pilgrims, As a specimen of the verse of Chaucer, in its original appearance, his description of the Miller may be here presented: The Miller was a stout carl for the nones, CHAUCER.-MANDEVILLE. -WICLIFFE. 15 are partly humorous stories of humble life, partly romantic tales of chivalry, and only a few of them are supposed to have been altogether the invention of the poet. The general idea of the work was undoubtedly taken from the Decameron of Boccaccio, which consists of a hundred tales, narrated like those of Chaucer, by a company assembled by accident. Chaucer wrote many other poems, some of which were narrative and descriptive, while others were allegorical. He is held, notwithstanding the obscurity which time has brought over his works, to rank with Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, and the other English poets of the first class. The age of Chaucer produced the two first writers of English prose, SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE, a celebrated traveller, and JOHN WICLIFFE, who distinguished himself by his attempts to reform religion. Mandeville travelled for thirty-four years preceding 1356, in Eastern countries, and on his return wrote in English, French, and Latin, an account of all he had seen, mixed up with innumerable fables, derived from preceding writers and from hearsay. Wicliffe, who was a learned ecclesiastic, and professor of divinity in Baliol College, Oxford, began It is unfortunate for the fame of Chaucer, and still more so for his countrymen, that his obsolete words, and old mode of spelling, render his poems very difficult to be understood. Several attempts have been made, with greater or less success, to modernize them in such a manner as to renew their popularity; the latest was by Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke, in a work entitled the Riches of Chaucer, (2 vols. London, 1835,) which presents all that is truly excellent of this old poet, in the spelling of the present day, excepting where the original orthography is necessary to help out the measure. As a specimen of the pathos of Chaucer, in Mr. Clarke's edition, may be given the dying words of Arcite, in which the very structure of the verse may be said to aid in the effect; its breaks and changes seeming to represent, as a critic has remarked, the sighs and sobbings of a broken and ebbing spirit: Alas the woe! alas the painés strong, That I for you have suffered, and so long! Alas the death! alas mine Emily! Alas departing of our company! Alas mine hearté's queen! alas my wife! Mine hearté's lady, ender of my life! What is this world?-what asken men to have? Now with his love, now in his coldé grave- about the year 1377 to write both in Latin and English against the power of the Pope, and the various observances of the Catholic church; from his doing this long before general attention was directed to the subject, he has been called 'the Morning Star of the Reformation.' Among his voluminous writings, was a translation of the Bible into English, which, however, was not the first that had been executed. As a specimen of the prose of this period, a passage from his New Testament is quoted below.* Chaucer must also be considered as one of the prose writers of this age; he wrote, in that manner, a philosophical and meditative work called the Testament of Love, and two of the Canterbury Tales are in prose. The English language was now beginning to be considered as sufficiently polite for literary purposes, and was every where rising in estimation. From the Conquest till this time, French had been the language of education, and when Latin was translated in the schools, it was not translated into English, but into French. But now the schoolmasters began to acknowledge the existence of English, and to construe Latin into it. The King (Edward III.) also abolished the use of French in the public acts and judicial proceedings, and substituted English in its stead. This English, however, as already mentioned, contained many French words, which had been gradually adopted from the Norman gentry. The language at this time used in the Lowland districts of Scotland was chiefly of Teutonic origin, partly through the Saxons who had spread northward, and partly through Danish settlers and others from the north of Europe, who had taken possession of the eastern coasts. Except in its having a slighter mixture of Norman, the Scotch at this time very much resembled the English, and continued to do so till a comparatively recent period. As literary ideas and modes usually rose in the *This Moisis ledde hem out, and dide woundris and signes in the lond of Egipte, and in the Reed See, and in Desert, fourti gheeris. This is Moisis that seide to the sones of Israel, God schal reise to ghou a prophete of ghoure britheren; as me ghe schulen heere him. This it is that was in the chirche in wildirnesse with the aungel that spak to him in the Mount Syna, and with oure fadris, which took wordis of lyf to ghyue to us. South of Europe, and went northward, England naturally became the medium through which these were communicated to Scotland, and the latter country was of course a little later in exhibiting native writers of all the various orders. Thus the time of Chaucer and of genuine Poetry in England, was that in which Scotland first produced rhyming chroniclers; while the minstrels were a little later still. The first of the Scottish chroniclers was JOHN BARBOUR, archdeacon in the cathedral of Aberdeen, and a man of considerable learning. He, about the year 1371, composed a long poem in eightsyllabled measure, commemorating the adventures of King Robert Bruce. Though this work must for general reasons be classed with the chronicles, it is allowed to possess no small share of the spirit of contemporary English poetry; it describes incidents with a graphic force far above the character of a chronicle, and abounds in beautiful episodes and fine sentimental passages. Hence we may assume that, though Barbour bestowed his attention upon a form of composition now beginning to be antiquated in England, he partook nevertheless of the improved style which Chaucer had adopted, and was capable of producing poems of the same general nature. His apostrophe to freedom, which occurs at the close of a description of the miserable slavery to which Scotland had been reduced by Edward of England, has always been admired for its spirit and tenderness;* and many other passages equally worthy of notice, could be pointed out. *A! fredome is a nobill thing! |