"Perhaps, however, I have not wholly failed in the execution of my design. I was desirous of convincing my countrymen, that there existed mines of instruction and delight, with which they had hitherto little acquaintance. I have led my readers, with however unconfirmed a speech and inadequate powers, to the different sources of information; and, if I have been unable to present what should satisfy a vigorous and earnest curiosity, I have wished to say enough to awaken their enquiries, and communicate to them some image of men and times, which have long since been no more. "It was my purpose to produce a work of a new species. Antiquities have too generally been regarded as the province of men of cold empers and sterile imaginations, writers who by their phlegmatic and desultory inJustry have brought discredit upon a science, hich is perhaps beyond all others fraught with wisdom, moral instruction, and intellecual improvement. Their books may indeed e considerably useful to the patient enquirer, ho would delineate the picture of past times or himself; but they can scarcely incite enairy; and their contents are put together with such narrow views, so total an absence 5 discrimination, and such an unsuspecting orance of the materials of which man is Lade, that the perusal of them tends for the ast part to stupify the sense, and to imbue soul with moping and lifeless dejection. "It was my wish, had my power held al pace with my strong inclination, to ry the workings of fancy and the spirit of losophy into the investigation of ages past. was anxious to rescue for a moment the ustrious dead from the jaws of the grave, make them pass in review before me, to tion their spirits and record their ann. I wished to make myself their masof the ceremonies, to introduce my reader their familiar speech, and to enable him to for the instant as if he had lived with aucer." A dissertation upon the period (as Mr. iwin chuses to call it) of the birth of ucer, precedes the work. It is satisory and curious, proving, or at least ming to prove, that when the poet deed himself upon a trial to be forty years old and upward, he was in reality fifty-eight. Chaucer was born in London, 1328, and it may, says his biographer, with some plausibility be inferred, that his father was a merchant. Now, he having been born in London, it is proper to examine what sort of a city London was at that time; therefore, the first chapter of Mr. Godwin's Life of Chaucer, is a history and description of the city of London! The second chapter is upon the state of learning in England, under the Norman and Plantagenet princes, with reference to Chaucer's education. The third professes to treat of the school-boy amusements of Chaucer, the whole infor mation upon which important topic is comprised in this sentence," there were other authors who it can scarcely be questioned, furnished some of the favourite recreations of his boyish years; these were the writers of romance:" therefore, Chaucer having read romances, and romances being connected with chivalry, and chivalry having grown out of the feudal system, Mr. Godwin tells us all he knows concerning the feudal system, chivalry, and romance, in all which the reader, who has read the commonest modern books upon these subjects, will find nothing that he did not know before. "After the consideration of the scene in which a man has spent his boyish years, and the studies and modes of imagination to which his early attention has been directed, there is nothing which can be of more importance in moulding the youthful mind, than the religious sentiments which in our tender age have been communicated to us. As we have no direct information as to this particular in the education of Chaucer, it is fair to fix our ideas respecting him at the middle point, and to believe that he was brought up in all that institution which, relative to the times when he was born, was regarded as seemly, decent, and venerable, neither deviating into the excesses of libertinism on the one hand, nor of a minute and slavish spirit of devotion on the other." It is indeed probable that Chaucer was brought up in what his biographer calls the holy apostolical Roman Catholic faith;" for as there existed in England nothing but Jews and Catholics, and as we know he was not a Jew, it may per haps be affirmed that he was, or, to use the historian's favourite tense of induc tion, that he must have been a Catholic. --Proceeding, therefore, upon this supposition, Mr. Godwin describes, in his fourth chapter, the establishments and practices of the church of England in the fourteenth century. When the poet was a young man he must have heard the minstrels: so Chau. cer and the minstrels are the fifth chapter. This leads to a dissertation on the origin of the English stage, profane dramas, miracle plays, pageants, mysteries, and masks, in which not a single faet is added to the information contained in Warton and Henry. The feast of fools and the feast of the ass, feasts and pageants, hunting and hawking, archery, athletic exercises, robbery and tournaments fill another long chapter; because all these must have affected the tone of manners and the popular mind in the days of Chaucer. Chaucer must have seen castles and cathedrals and palaces: so the eighth chapter is upon Gothic architecture, and contains a full description of a castle, from Grose! And the ninth chapter treats upon sculpture and painting, metallic arts, embroidery and music; because the state of all these arts must have influenced the mind of Chaucer. In the tenth chapter we find Chaucer at Cambridge; and here, having travelled over 185 pages, we hoped we had arrived at the subject of the book; but here we find the state of the universities, the monastic and mendicant orders, the schoolmen, and the natural philosophy of the fourteenth century. At the end of this comes a recapitulation. "It was the good fortune of Chaucer that he had led the early years of his life in scenes of concourse and variety, that he was condemned to no piemature and compulsory solitude, and that his mind was not suffered to vegetate in that indolence and vacancy which, when they occupy an extensive portion of human life, are so destructive and deadly to the intellectual powers. He was born in London. In the midst of this famous and flourishing metropolis he was, as he expresses it, forth growen.' His father was probably a merchant; and Chaucer was furnished, from his earliest hours of observation, with an opportunity of remarking upon the insensible growth of that new rank of men, the burgesses, which about this time gave a new face to the political constitutions of Europe. Private and domestic education had scarcely any where been heard of; and Chaucer, in all probability, frequented some of those populous and tumultuary schools so circumstantially described by William Fitz stephen. Here his mind was excited by example, and stimulated by rivalship; he pa sed much of his time in the society of his equals, observed their passions, and acted, and was acted upon in turn, by their senti ments and pursuits. When he had finished his classes here, he was removed to Cambridge, where six thousand fellow-students waited to receive him. He had no difficulty in finding solitude when his inclination prompted him to seek it; and we may be sitely the beauties of nature, sought it often; certain that a mind which relished so exqui but he was never palled with it. The effect of both these circumstances is conspicures in his writings. He is fond of allegories and reveries, for oft the post brush'd with hasty step the dewa away, To meet the sun;" and he is the poet of manners, because he frequented the haunts of men, and was ar quainted with his species in all their varieties of modification." Some centuries ago, when an author was about to write a book, he conside ed that all his readers were unlearned; that they who should read his volume, had perhaps never read another; and. therefore, he usually gave them the whole stock of his knowledge, beginning generally with Adam, and so proceeding regularly down to his own subject. This is the case with Mr. Godwin: came "in a manner a novice to the present undertaking;" and taking it fo granted that all those who read his bo were to be as ignorant as he was himsel when he began to write it, he has there fore told them all he knows. In these chapters which we have notice there is positively nothing but what is t be found in modern authors; in Was ton, in Henry, in Grose, in St. Palai Percy, Ritson, and Ellis; books wh are in every private library, at least every library where two quarto volum upon the life of Chaucer can be expect.. to find a place. "Before we enter upon a particular mination of any of Chaucer's poems, proper that we should pay some attentica the circumstance of their being writter the English tongue. This language, already been remarked, after the access of the Norman race to the throne of island, was consigned to oblivion and tempt, driven from the seats and rehne of learning, and confined for the most to the cottages of the peasantry. Befort period of Chaucer, we had already poets, Wace and Benoit may most properly be considered as ours, and the English monarchs were among the most conspicuous and munificent in the list of patrons of the literature of that age. But Wace and Benoit wrote the language of the Northern French. English indeed, or Saxon (for our ideas on this subject will be rendered more accurate by our considering these as two names for the same thing), had always continued the language of the bulk of the inhabitants of this island; and a few efforts from time to time show themselves to perpetuate our native tongue in the form of poetry. Layamon, an English monk, translated the Brut of Wace in no long time after it was written; and Robert of Gloucester, and Robert Man ning, composed certain rhyming chronicles of the history of England, about the end of the thirteenth century. But none of these attempts were much calculated to excite the ardor and ambition of their contemporaries: the English continued to be the language of barbarity and rudeness; while the French had in its favour the fashion which countenanced it, the refinement of those who wrote it, and the variety and multitude of their productions and inventions." This passage contains many errors: to consider Saxon and English as two names for the same thing, would be as bsurd as to consider the Norman French and English, or Latin and Italian, as the ame thing. The translation of Layanon is in simple and unmixed, though ery barbarous Saxon. These are the Fords of Mr. Ellis, whose assertions as sual are substantiated by proof; and his same work of Wace was translated English by Robert Manning, or as eis commonly called Robert de Brunne. "Chaucer saw immediately in which ay the path of fame was most open to his zes; that it was by the cultivation of his ive tongue and his seeing this at the age of eighteen, is no common proof the magnitude of his powers. It has been observed that the English language rose the rise of the Commons; an event h first discovered itself in the reign of , and which was attained and fixed un1 Edward J. Chaucer perhaps perceived, was the first to perceive, that from this 1 the English tongue must necessarily adin purity, in popularity, and in dignity, finally triumph over every competitor in the circuit of its native soil. The therefore, in the realm of England, wrote for permanence, was bound by most urgent motives to write in this age. Nor was the prosperous career our lan**was about to run, by any means the or the strongest argunient for recurring use of it. For the poet to attempt to 1. Rev. VOL. II. express his thoughts in French, was for him voluntarily to subject himself to many of the disadvantages which attend the attempt to write poetry in a dead language. What is so written can scarcely be entirely worthy of the name of poetry. It can but weakly convey the facility of our thoughts, or the freshness of our impressions. Chaucer was a genuine Englishman, a native of our island, hitherto confined within our shores, and born in the class of our burgesses and merchants. French was to him probably like a foreign language: all his boyish feelings had been expressed in English. English words were mingled and associated with all the scenes he had beheld, and all the images he had conceived. For a man to communicate the thoughts he has formed in one language in the words of another, is a position not less unfortunate, than to be condemned to contemplate a beautiful woman, net by turning our eyes immediately upon her person, but by regarding her figure as shadowed in a mirror. "To master any language is a task too great for the narrow space of human life. It is perfectly true, however paradoxical it may sound, that the man never yet existed who was completely possessed of the treasures of his native tongue. Many delicacies and shades of meaning, many happy combinations and arrangements of words, are familiar to one man, of which his neighbour is ignorant; while, on the other hand, his neighbour possesses stores of a similar sort, have once been observed by any man, obto which he is a stranger. Those also which viously divide themselves into two classes; one which he has always at hand, and may be conceived in a certain sense as making part of himself; and the other, phrases and expressions which he once knew and comprehended, but which now he rarely remembers or bas totally forgotten. If then no man ever yet possessed the treasures of his native tongue, what presumption or fatuity ought it to be accounted, for him voluntarily to undergo the disadvantage of expressing himself in another? Add to which; even when we have mastered the supposed foreign language, we can still give it no more than the copy of the words of our early years, words which relatively to us may almost be considered as the ideas themselves." The question is next considered whether Chaucer or Gower were the earlier English writer, and it is decided that Chaucer" is well entitled to be considered as original in his attempt to model his native tongue to the language of poetry." That Chaucer was our first great poet, and is one of our few great poets, will not be disputed; but the praise which is here claimed for him, is without foundation: he took the language as he found it, and improved it Hh as every man of genius writing in a rude language has done and must do in every country. Monks, and minstrels, and ballad-singers, had preceded him; and the metrical romances to which he refers in his Rime of Sir Thopas, however inferior in many other respects, are written in language as nearly, or more nearly, resembling modern English, and in metres more intricate and more harmonious, than any of his productions. The remainder of this chapter is employed upon the French, Provençal, and italian poets. In the next chapter, the Court of Love is analyzed. This was the poet's first production. The faults and beauties of the plan are fairly appreciated, and some deductions inferred relative to the author himself. This is followed by some remarks upon ancient and modern English poetry. Nothing can be more pernicious than the opinion which idleness and an incurious ten per alone have hitherto sufficed to maintain, that the modern writers of verse in any country are to be styled the poets of that country. This absurdity was never carried to a greater extreme then in the book entitled Johnson's Lives of the most eminent English Poets. The first poet in his series is Cowley; and, if the tide of his book were properly filled up, it would stand, Lives of the most eminent English poets, from the decline of poetry in England to the time of the author. The brilliant and astonishing ages of our poetry are wholly omitted. Milton is the only author in Johnson's series, who can lay claim to a true sublimity of conception, and an inexhaustible storehouse of imagery. Pope is an elegant writer, and expresses himself with admirable neatness and compression; Dryden is a man of an ardent and giant mind, who pours out his sentiments in a fervour and tumult of eloquence, and imparts an electricity of pleasure to every reader capable of understanding his excellence. But it is not in Dryden and Pope, in their contemporaries and successors, that we are told to look for the peculiar and appropriate features of poetry, for that which separates and distinguishes poetry from every other species of composition. It is Spenser, it is Shakespear, it is Fletcher, with some of their contemporaries and predecessors, who are our gentine poets, who are the men that an Eng1shman of a poctical soul would gather round him when he challenges all the world, and stands up and proudly asks where, in ail the ages of literature and refinement, he is to find their competitors and rivals? It is easy to perceive, and has been veribed in the example of all ages and climates, that poetry has been the genuine associate of the cailier stages of literature. There is then a freshness in language aduerably adapted to those emotions which peru delights to produce. Our words are then the images of things, the representatives of t ble and audible impressions: after a whe too many of our words become cold a scientific, perfectly suited to the topics reasoning, but unfitted for imagery and par sion; and dealing in abstractions and gen ralities, instead of presenting to us afresh u impressions of sense. "The attempts of the poet are boldest an most successful when the whole field is op to him, when he must seek for modelsdistant ages and countries, not when the e cellence to which he aspires is pre-occuper. by poets in his own language, whose men and reputation he cannot hope to equalCriticism too, though it may make ma judges, never perhaps ripened one gem It is a deadly foe to bold and adventure. attempts, and scarcely leaves any hope success, but to him who aspires to please just as we have been pleased an hand. times before. One circumstance which has contribs ed to the neglect into which the works Chaucer have fallen, is the supposition th his language is obsolete. It is not obsolet It is not more obscure than the language Spenser, and scarcely more than that of Shakespear. Most of the English writ from the death of Chaucer to the times! Elizabeth, are more obscure than our pe The English tongue underwent little after.tion till the reign of that princess. "Chaucer's style, in his principal work is easy, flowing, and unaffected; and such style, whatever may have been the circum stances of the writer, can almost never be a scure. We take ten times more pains familiarise ourselves with the idioms of It and France, than would be necessary to m ter that of the old English writers; wher this latter acquisition would be forty u more useful, since, in addition to the intri.. sic merits of their works, we should cu vate the fine poetical and moral feeling nexed to the contemplation of a vener antiquity; and since it is only by obser the progressive stages of a language, that we can become thoroughly acquainted with genius, its characteristic features, and its sources. All that repels us in the langu of Chaucer is merely superficial appeara and first impression: contemplate it e with a little perseverance, and what seem to be deformity will, in many instances, i converted into beauty. A fortnight's a cation would be sufficient to make ourselves perfectly at home with this pattiuof our poetry" With the opinion here expressed, it most fully and unequivocally agree. M: Godwin has, however, fallen into a ve common but very unaccountable mi take, in asserting that the language v Chaucer is not more obscure than the language of Spenser: Spenser has given an appearance of antiquity to his words by frequent ellisions, and by a forced orthography; but the words which actually require a reference to the glossary are so few, that neither man, woman, or child, of common understanding and common attainments, will ever feel obstructed by them in the perusal. The different size of the glossaries to the two poets will alone decide the question. We will venture to affirm, that a woman will experience more verbal difficulties in the Paradise Lost, and ten-fold more in the macaronic prose of Dr. Johnson, than in the Faery Queen. With regard to Shakespere, Chaucer is certainly far less obscure, but who does not think himself capable of understanding Shakespere? His obscurity lies in intricacy of syntax, in remoteness of allusion, in rapid association, in profound thought or profounder feeling,-not in words; and that the mass of mankind, if they understand the words singly, will take it for granted that they understand their collective meaning, whether they have a meaning or no, is a fact upon which the reputation of many a modern writer is tounded. To our astonishment we find that the next chapter is entirely devoted to the plague of London in 1349! because it must have" produced a great effect upon Chaucer!" Doubtless when in the year 2200 of the vulgar era, (if the vulgar era shall so long last) some future philosopher shall write the life of William Godwin, in quarto or in folio: that the work may be proportioned in magnitude to his fame, he will insert the history of La Grippe, presuming that that influenza mast have" produced a great effect" apon Mr. Godwin. And we do there fore exhort Mr. Godwin carefully to preserve and deposit the receipts or prescriptions from which he derived most benefit in that complaint, recollecting what enthusiastic pleasure he should himself have felt, had he encountered such a document for his memoirs of Geoffrey Chaucer. We now come to the Troilus and Creseide. Chaucer had referred to Lollius as the original author, from whom he ad translated this tale; and Lydrate expressly mentions, that the title of the original work was Trophe. But no such author as Lollius is elsewhere mentioned, or known to have existed, and as the same tale is the subject of Boccaccio's Philostrato, Tyrwhit has supposed the English poem to have been taken from the Italian. In refutation of this opinion, Mr. Godwin offers some judicious remarks. "Mr. Tyrwhit seems inclined to consider Lollius as the name of a man who had no other existence than in the forgery of Chaucer. But this is a strange hypothesis. What motive had Chaucer for such a forgery? The poem of Troilus and Creseide was certainly not written by Lollius Nibi cus, a Roman historian of the third century, to whom it is thoughtlessly ascribed in Speght's and Urry's editions; since it is interspersed with ideas of chivalry, which did not exist till long after that period: and Mr. Tyrwhit perhaps had never heard of any other Lollius. It is surely, however, too hasty a conclusion, because his name has not reached us from any other quarter, to say that he never existed. How many auvery names, may we reasonably suppose to thors, with their memories, even to their have been lost in the darkness of the middle ages! Not to travel out of the present subject for an illustration, if the Filostrato, a considerable poem of so celebrated an author as Boccaccio, had so nearly perished, who will wonder that the original work, and the name of the author from whom Boccaccio translated it, have now sunk into total oblivion? 66 of the real existence of Lollius, which ocThere is a further very strong evidence curs in the writings of Chaucer. One of our poet's most considerable works is entitled the House of Fame; and in this poem, among a cluster of worthies, he introduces the writers who had recorded the story of Troy. They are as follow: Homer, Dares, Titus (or Dictys) Lollius, Guido dalla Colonna, and Geoffrey of Monmouth. "Boccaccio is known to have been fre quently a translator. Very many of the tales in the Decamerone, that of Grisildis for example, to which we shall soon have occa sion to refer, existed before his time. He assures us himself that he translated the Teseide from a Latin original. Is it not more the same source? Is it not obvious to imathan probable that the Filostrato came from gine that Chaucer and Boccaccio copied from the employment of the first revivers of learnone original? Translation was peculiarly ing: nor did they hold it otherwise than in the highest degree honourable, to open to their unlearned countrymen the sacred fountains of knowledge, which had so long been consigned to obscurity and neglect. "After all, however, the Troilus is by no means the exact counterpart of the Filostrato, is divided into ten books, and the Troilus To onit minuter differences, the Filostrato into only five. Add to which, the Troilus, which consists of about eight thousand lines, contains three thousand more than the Filos |