with Wyclif and the early reformers, although he would not have
gone so far as they, and led, unlike them, a worldly life. Thus by
these poems he has rendered a service to his country, outside his
literary legacy, which has always been held in value. The father
of English poetry belonged to the school of progress and of
inquiry, like his great contemporaries on the Continent. But while
he paints the manners, customs, and characters of the fourteenth
century, he does not throw light on the great ideas which agitated
or enslaved the age. He is too real and practical for that. He
describes the outward, not the inner life. He was not serious
enough--I doubt if he was learned enough--to enter into the
disquisitions of schoolmen, or the mazes of the scholastic
philosophy, or the meditations of almost inspired sages. It is not
the joys of heaven or the terrors of hell on which he discourses,
but of men and women as they lived around him, in their daily
habits and occupations. We must go to Wyclif if we would know the
theological or philosophical doctrines which interested the
learned. Chaucer only tells how monks and friars lived, not how
they speculated or preached. We see enough, however, to feel that
he was emancipated from the ideas of the Middle Ages, and had cast
off their gloom, their superstition, and their despair. The only
things he liked of those dreary times were their courts of love and
their chivalric glories.

I do not propose to analyze the poetry of Chaucer, or enter upon a
critical inquiry as to his relative merits in comparison with the
other great poets. It is sufficient for me to know that critics
place him very high as an original poet, although it is admitted
that he drew much of his material from French and Italian authors.
He was, for his day, a great linguist. He had travelled