even the great churchmen, were illiterate and heavy-witted. The Normans overhauled the libraries, scraped the Saxon books clean of what they regarded as their contemptible contents, and re-covered the vellum with their own Latin and French compositions. In their irreverent greed for writing material they left their work of scraping in some cases so badly done that we may still decipher fragments of old English on the margins of Norman manuscripts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. But, while they thus ill-treated Saxon books, the Normans did not fail to supply us with the means of a new and more plentiful literature. From 1066 until 1200, England was but part of a dominion which stretched from the Tweed to the Garonne, and was belted across its middle by the waters of the Channel. In the reign of John, the hitherto intimate connection of England with the Continent was severed by his loss of French territories. But by this time England had secured from the connection advantages which it could never lose. And one of the chief of these was the establishment in England of the Norman system of teaching. A hundred and fifty years after the Conquest there were scattered over the land more than five hundred schools, in which the teachers were, especially in the beginning, Normans. And it is probable that not the Norman kings, nor the Archbishops themselves, were such active agents in spreading a knowledge of French and of French books as were those five hundred educated foreigners, who brought with them into the remotest districts and villages of England the latest literary gossip from the Continent, and a contagious enthusiasm for the poets of their native land. By these and other means, it is conceivable that a knowledge of popular French books did actually penetrate English educated society, and that the great French romances, or portions of them, were to some extent familiar even among what may be called the non-reading classes of mediæval England. The habit of writing and reading for the purpose of pleasing and being pleased having been once acquired, the ascent of both poet and reader to a higher enjoyment was not difficult; and in the most renowned of the old Romans,

weaving of high and graceful morals with subtle delicacies of thought and style.

The literary history of England during the three centuries which followed the Conquest is, in truth, little more than an account of how and to what degree French culture acted upon the English mind. But at length the period had arrived when English poetry, retaining in it all that it had acquired from three centuries of foreign drill and stimulus, began to show signs of inherent and native vigour; when, in fact, it was no longer seeking to be a mere pleasing echo of music from over the sea, but was beginning to assume the character of a national literature, the spontaneous expression of the sentiments and aspirations of the English people. For this end something more was needed than the imitation, however exact, of the best foreign models. The specimens which have been preserved of original imaginative poetry in English before the age of Chaucer represent the English tongue as, up to that time, existing in a number of dialects. Every district had its own peculiar local speech, and there was not one dialect in the land which was generally recognised as that of educated persons and of literature. A consequence of this broken-up condition of English was that books had only what one may term a limited circulation, confined to the districts in which they were produced; and a national literature, common to the whole people, was in the meantime an impossibility. Of the dialects into which the English tongue was distributed in the middle of the fourteenth century, the East Midland, spoken with some variation from the Humber to the Thames, was, says Mr. Morris, "perhaps the simplest in its grammatical structure, the most free from those broad provincialisms which particularised the speech of other districts, and presented the nearest approach in form and substance to the language of the present day as spoken and written by educated Englishmen." The Ormulum, of the date 1215 (King John, 1199–1216), a devotional poem by a monk named Orm or Ormin, who is supposed to have lived somewhere between London and Peterborough, is in this dialect. The Chronicle of Robert of

verse from the French rhyming Chronicle of Peter Langtoft in the early years of Edward III.'s reign, is another example of this East Midland English. But neither of these works, although both are important, had been of sufficient power and literary merit, any more than other works in other dialects, to take such hold of the entire reading public of Britain that the dialect in which it happened to have been written should be henceforward accepted as the standard literary English. Perhaps no one man's genius could ever have achieved this triumph over a Babel of provincialisms; but a number of circumstances did finally bring the speech of the East Midland districts into prominence. French, which was, from the Conquest until the fourteenth century, the language of the king and his courtiers, and of the society which radiated in every direction from the court centre, at length fell, even in the highest circles, into disuse; and the kind of English which took its place, and which is the forefather of our present Court-English, was that of educated English persons in the district of court-life, namely, London and its neighbourhood. Chaucer and Gower were courtiers, mingling during their whole lives with the most noble and cultured society in the kingdom; and it was the influence of their writings, united with that of the court, which gave to this particular form of East Midland English the superior rank which it has ever since held among English dialects. For the first time in the history of Britain, Englishmen possessed a language universally accepted among themselves as the standard language of literature and of educated society, and from that point commenced the accumulation of a literature in the English tongue which we may call, in the truest sense, national. The Bruce of Barbour, and the Vision of Langland, are in dialects which have since become restricted to a district and a class; but the poetry of Chaucer and of Gower was written in the same Court-English, which afterwards became every year more widely distributed over the country.

Chaucer may be said to have started in life with an unusually splendid literary outfit. He inherited the whole wealth of the English tongue at the precise moment when

purposes, but had not yet been assayed. Everything that had to be said in the best way by our poets was still unsaid. No hand had struck the harp that hung in golden silence in the air of England. The age, too, in which Chaucer lived immediately succeeded one of the most brilliant in European literary history. To the Romances of the French Trouvères -the Arthurian Romances, the Romances of King Horn, of King Alexander, of the Rose, and others—which had been read widely over the Continent during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, were added in the fourteenth the works of the great Italian poets. Dante died in 1321, about twenty years after he had written his Divina Commedia. Petrarch lived till 1374, Boccaccio till 1375. Chaucer's genius has made him solitary among the English writers of his own time, but it has allied him in proud relationship with this greater European cluster. The continental relations of England were greatly extended during Edward III.'s reign by means of the wars with France, and the exigencies of trade; and the poet Chaucer, recognised by the king as wise, courteous, and trustworthy, and withal acquainted with foreign tongues, was many times employed by his royal master in state business at the courts of French and Italian potentates. In this way he was brought into the very midst of the most brilliant civilisation and the most refined literature in Europe; and in his works may be found written, as clearly as in a prose journal, the rich and varied results of his travel. His reputed early poems, such as the Romaunt of the Rose, etc., point almost exclusively to culture in French medieval literature. The Death of Blanche the Duchess, written in 1369 in memory of Blanche, first wife of John of Gaunt, and The Complaint to Pity, probably of about the same date, were perhaps those of Chaucer's works in which strong personal emotion overcame all pre-constructed forms and methods. The Death of Blanche starts, like the romances of the Trouvères, with the approved dream-story. The commencement, in its gorgeous mediæval colouring and incident, out-does anything in the Roman de la Rose itself; but ere long Chaucer is led by his own free English fancy beyond all that mediæval

a true English love-story, and a real sorrow. To his maturer years are ascribed the Troilus and Creseide, the Canterbury Tales, the House of Fame, and the Legend of Good Women. In many of these, the subject, form, or metres, have been distinctly acquired in the course of foreign travel or foreign reading. The stories of Troilus and Creseide and the Knight's Tale, and the entire plan of the Canterbury Tales, were taken from Boccaccio; the story told by the Nuns' priest, of the poor widow and her cock" Chaunticlere," is borrowed from a fable of Marie, a French poetess, and occurs originally in an old French metrical romance called Roman de Renart; and the Franklin relates the story of the faithful Dorigen in her castle among the black rocks of Bretagne, which he had heard in a lay of the "olde gentil Bretons." The Wife of Bath is indignant with Jankin for poring over books of invective against women and marriage, such as abounded in Chaucer's age. Her story, which follows the voluble account of her married life, occurs also in Gower's Confessio Amantis, and is found in the Gesta Romanorum, a collection of mediæval fables and anecdotes. Indeed, the poems of Chaucer represent their author as a man of wide and varied reading of that kind, romantic, gay, and curious, which was most serviceable to his genius, and which was only to be met with in the literatures of foreign countries. The work upon which his fame chiefly rests is the Canterbury Tales. They occupied, doubtless, a considerable portion of his life; but Mr. Furnivall places the central period of their production in 1386. This was the year in which Chaucer, aged "forty years and upwards,” sat in Parliament at Westminster, from October 1st to November 1st, as one of the Knights of the Shire for Kent. At this date the old king had been dead for nine years, and Richard and the country were still ruled by Edward's sons. The peasantry had failed in 1381 to obtain from the youthful king or the Parliament enfranchisement from serfdom. Religious reform had been checked by the death of Wycliffe in 1384. But the English Bible, which Wycliffe had bequeathed to the English nation, was doing its work, in spite of all obstructions, in favour of both social and