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but a poet with thorough truth of substance and an answering truth of style, giving us a poetry sound to the core. We all of us have a leaning towards the pathetic, and may be inclined perhaps to prize Burns most for his touches of piercing, sometimes almost intolerable, pathos; for verse like:

We twa hae paidl't i' the burn

From mornin' sun till dine;

But seas between us braid hae roar'd

Sin auld lang syne...'

where he is as lovely as he is sound. But perhaps it is by the perfection of soundness of his lighter and archer master-pieces that he is poetically most wholesome for us. For the votary misled by a personal estimate of Shelley, as so many of us have been, are, and will be,-of that beautiful spirit building his many-coloured haze of words and images

'Pinnacled dim in the intense inane'

no contact can be wholesomer than the contact with Burns at his archest and soundest. Side by side with the

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On the brink of the night and the morning

My coursers are wont to respire,

But the Earth has just whispered a warning

That their flight must be swifter than fire...

of Prometheus Unbound, how salutary, how very salutary, to place this from Tam Glen:

'My minnie does constantly deave me

And bids me beware o' young men;
They flatter, she says, to deceive me;

But wha can think sae o' Tam Glen?'

But we enter on burning ground as we approach the poetry of times so near to us, poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, of which the estimates are so often not only personal, but personal with passion. For my purpose, it is enough

to have taken the single case of Burns, the first poet we come to of whose work the estimate formed is evidently apt to be personal, and to have suggested how we may proceed, using the poetry of the great classics as a sort of touchstone, to correct this estimate, as we had previously corrected by the same means the historic estimate where we met with it. A collection like the present, with its succession of celebrated names and celebrated poems, offers a good opportunity to us for resolutely endeavouring to make our estimates of poetry real. I have sought to point out a method which will help us in making them so, and to exhibit it in use so far as to put any one who likes in a way of applying it for himself.

At any rate the end to which the method and the estimate are designed to lead, and from leading to which, if they do lead to it, they get their whole value,—the benefit of being able clearly to feel and deeply to enjoy the best, the truly classic, in poetry,is an end, let me say it once more at parting, of supreme importance. We are often told that an era is opening in which we are to see multitudes of a common sort of readers, and masses of a common sort of literature; that such readers do not want and could not relish anything better than such literature, and that to provide it is becoming a vast and profitable industry. Even if good literature entirely lost currency with the world, it would still be abundantly worth while to continue to enjoy it by oneself. But it never will lose currency with the world, in spite of momentary appearances; it never will lose supremacy. Currency and supremacy are insured to it, not indeed by the world's deliberate and conscious choice, but by something far deeper,-by the instinct of self-preservation in humanity.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

CHAUCER.

[GEOFFREY CHAUCER, born in London probably about 1340, died at Westminster in 1400. He was the son of a vintner; was page in Prince Lionel's household, served in the army, was taken prisoner in France. He was afterwards valet and squire to Edward III, and went as king's commissioner to Italy in 1372, and later. He was Controller of the Customs in the port of London from 1381 to 1386, was M. P. for Kent in 1386, Clerk of the King's Works at Windsor in 1389, and died poor. Mr. Furnivall divides. his poetical history into four periods: (1) up to 1371, including the early poems, viz. the A. B. C, the Compleynte to Pité, the Boke of the Duchesse, and the Compleynte of Mars; (2) from 1372 to 1381, including the Troylus and Criseyde, Anelida, and the Former Age; (3) the best period, from 1381 to 1389, including the Parlement of Foules, the Hous of Fame, the Legende of Goode Women, and the chief of the Canterbury Tales; (4) from 1390 to 1400, including the latest Canterbury Tales, and the Ballades and Poems of Reflection and later age, of which the last few, like the Steadfastness, show failing power.]

It is natural that a book which aims at including the best that has been done in English verse should begin with Chaucer, to whom no one has ever seriously denied the name which Dryden gave him, of the Father of English poetry. The poems of an earlier date, the Brut and the Ormulum, the Romances and the Homilies, have indeed an interest of their own; but it is a purely antiquarian interest, and even under that aspect it does not exist for the reader of Chaucer, who cannot in any sense be said to have been inspired by them. English poetry, distinguished on the one hand from the 'rym dogerel' of the romancers, which is not poetry, and on the other from Beowulf, which is poetry but not, in the ordinary sense, English, begins in the reign of Edward III, with Chaucer and his lesser contemporaries. In them we see at a

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glance that the step has been taken which separates the rhymer from the poet, the 'maker,' who has something new to say, and has found the art of saying it beautifully. The poet, says an Elizabethan critic, 'can express the true and lively of everything which is set before him, and which he taketh in hand to describe'— words that exactly meet Chaucer's case, and draw the line between himself and his predecessors. In the half century before Chaucer there had indeed been isolated poems-a lyric or two of real freshness and beauty-but not till that time of heightened national life, of wider culture, and of more harmonised society into which he was born, was there a sufficiency either of ideas or of accessible poetical material on English ground to shape and furnish an imaginative development like his. To him first among the writers of English it was given to catch and to express 'the true and lively' throughout a broad life of human range and feeling. Before him there had been story-telling, there had been stray notes of poetry but in Chaucer England brought forth her first poet, as modern times count poetry; her first skilled and conscious workman, who, coming in upon the stores of natural fact open to all alike, was enabled to communicate to whatever he touched that colour, that force, that distinction, in virtue of which common life and common feelings turn to poetry. And having found her poet, she did not fail to recognise him. Very soon, as Gower's 'Venus' says of him in the often-quoted lines,

Of ditës and of songës glad

The whiche he for my sake made
The land fulfilled is over al.'

The themes of his books run glibly from the tongue of his own 'Sergeaunt of Lawe,' like matter familiar to all. His literary contemporaries felt and confessed in him the Poet's mysterious gifts, and his height above themselves. The best English poetical opinion, in the mouth of Spenser, Sidney, Milton, Dryden, has continuously acknowledged him; while the more our later world turns back to him, and learns to read and understand him, the stronger grows his claim in even our critical modern eyes, not only to the antiquarian charm of the storyteller and the 'translateur,' but to the influence and honours of the poet.

Chaucer then is for us the first English poet, and as such has all the interest that attaches to a great original figure. But he makes

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