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A noble portrait in the English manner; there is but one, and that is wanting, we should have preferred. I mean the portrait of Chaucer himself that "wittie" Chaucer who "sate in a Chaire of Gold covered with Roses writing prose and risme, accompanied with the Spirites of many Kyngs, Knightes and Faire Ladies."
He wandered from town to town, and from castle to castle, to see the places of which he would write, and to learn events on the spot where they occurred. His first journey was to England; here he was employed by Queen Philippa of Hainault to accompany the Duke of Clarence to Milan, where he met Boccaccio and Chaucer.
While he was thus declaiming, Everard observed a book sticking out from beneath the pillow of the bed lately occupied by the honourable member. "Is that Chaucer?" he said, making to the volume; "I would like to look at the passage" "Chaucer?" said Bletson, hastening to interfere; "no that is Lucretius, my darling Lucretius. I cannot let you see it; I have some private marks."
It was Latin rather than Greek; it turned to the least imaginative side of Latin literature and found its models, not in Vergil, Catullus, and Lucretius, but in the satires, epistles, and didactic pieces of Juvenal, Horace, and Persius. The chosen medium of the new poetry was the heroic couplet. This had, of course, been used before by English poets as far back as Chaucer.
It is also interesting as containing, in the MS. in the British Museum, a drawing of Chaucer, from which all subsequent portraits have been taken. Poet, etc., b. in New York, s. of a lawyer, was bred to the same profession, but early deserted it for literature.
But various as is its melody in Chaucer, the fact of there being always an anticipation of the perfecting of a rhyme at the end of the couplet would make one accustomed to heroic verse ready to introduce a rhythmical fall and kind of close at the end of every blank verse in trying to write that measure for the first time. Still, as we say, there is good verse in Surrey's translation.
And so, Chaucer continues, as he could not sleep, to drive the night away he sat upright in his bed reading a "romance," which he thought better entertainment than chess or draughts.
I will conclude what I have to say of him singly, with this one remark: a lady of my acquaintance, who keeps a kind of correspondence with some authors of the fair sex in France, has been informed by them that Mademoiselle de Scudery, who is as old as Sibyl, and inspired like her by the same god of poetry, is at this time translating Chaucer into modern French.
Chaucer followed nature everywhere, but was never so bold to go beyond her; and there is a great difference of being poeta and nimis poeta if we believe Catullus, as much as betwixt a modest behaviour and affectation.
It appealed only to a limited public, for it is actually a collection of sixteen important law-cases set forth, with explanatory notes, in excellent verse imitated from poets great and small. Chaucer, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, Clough, Rossetti, and James Rhoades supply the models, and I have been credibly informed that the law is as good as the versification. Mr.
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