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best parts of persuasion; he is not reciprocal; he does not sufficiently sympathize with our towns and our blisses of society, and our reformations of churches (the consequences, after all, of his own. What would he not have said, by the by, in behalf of Popery, had he lived before a Reformation?) And it may be said of him, as Johnson said of Milton's "Allegro" and "Penseroso," that "no mirth indeed can be found in his melancholy;" but it is to be feared there is always some melancholy in his mirth." His Muse invites us to the treasures of his retirement in beautiful, noble, and inexhaustible language: but she does it, after all, rather like a teacher than a persuader; and fails in impressing upon us the last and best argument, that she herself is happy. Happy she must be, it is true, in many senses: for she is happy in the sense of power; happy in the sense of a good intention; happy in fame, in words, in the consciousness of immortal poetry: yet there she is, after all, not quite persuasive,

more rich in the means than in the ends, — with something of a puritan austerity upon her, more stately than satisfactory, - wanting in animal spirits, in perfect and hearty sympathy with our pleasures and her own. A vaporous melancholy hangs over his most beautiful landscapes. He seems always girding himself up for his pilgrimage of joy, rather than enjoying it; and his announcements are in a tone too exemplary and didactic. We admire him; we venerate him; we would fain agree with him: but we feel something wanting on his own part towards the largeness and healthiness of other men's wider experience; and we resent, for his sake as well as ours, that he

should insist upon squaring all which is to come in the interminable future with the visions that bound a college cap. We feel that it will hurt the effect of his genius with posterity, and make the most admiring of his readers, in the third and fourth generation, lament over his narrowness. In short, his poetry is the sunset to the English Church, - beautiful as the real sunset "with evening beam," gorgeous, melancholy, retrospective, giving a new and divine light to the lowliest flowers, and setting the pinnacles of the churches golden in the heavens. Yet nothing but a sunset and a retrospection it is. A new and great day is coming,

diviner still, we believe, -larger, more universal, more equable, showing (manifestly) the heavens more just, and making mankind more truly religious, because more cheerful and grateful.

The editor of "Blackwood" justly prides himself on having appreciated this noble poet from the first: but it is a pity, we think, that he looks back in anger upon those whose literary educations were less fortunate; who had been brought up in schools of a different taste; and who showed, after all, a natural strength of taste singularly honorable to them, in being able to appreciate real poetry at last, even in quarters to which the editor himself, we believe, has never yet done justice, though no man could do it better. For Wilson's prose (and we could not express our admiration of it more highly) might stretch forth its thick and rich territory by the side of Keats's poetry, like a land of congenial exuberance,—a forest tempest-tossed indeed, compared with those still valleys and enchanted gardens, but set in the same identical

region of the remote, the luxuriant, the mythological; governed by a more wilful and scornful spirit, but such as hates only from an inverted principle of the loving, impatient of want of sympathy, and incapable, in the last resort, of denying the beautiful wheresoever existing, because thereby it would deny the divine part of itself. Why should Christopher North revert to the errors of his critical brethren in past times, seeing that they are all now agreed, and that every one of them perhaps has something to forgive himself in his old judgments (ourselves assuredly not excepted, if we may be allowed to name ourselves among them)? Men got angry from political differences, and were not in a temper to give dispassionate poetical judgments. And yet Wordsworth had some. of his greatest praises from his severest political opponents (Hazlitt, for instance); and out of the former Scotch school of criticism, which was a French one, or that of Pope and Boileau, came the first hearty acknowledgment of the merits of Keats, for whom we were delighted the other day to find that an enthusiastic admiration is retained by the chief of that school (Jeffrey), whose natural taste has long had the rare honor of triumphing over his educational one; and who ought, we think, now that he is a Lord of Session, to follow at his leisure moments the example set him by the most accomplished of all national benches of judicature, and give us a book that should beat, nevertheless, all the Kameses and Woodhouselees before him: as it assuredly would.

21I

SPECIMENS OF CHAUCER.

No. I.

EOFFREY CHAUCER was born in Lon

don, in the year 1328, apparently of a gentleman's family; and was bred in the court of Edward the Third. He married a sister of Catherine Swynford, mistress, and afterwards wife, to the king's son, John of Gaunt; and was employed in court-offices, and in a mission to Italy, where he is supposed to have had an interview with Petrarch. In the subsequent reign he fell into trouble, owing to his connection with John of Gaunt's party and the religious reformers of those days: upon which he fled to the Continent, but returned; and, after an imprisonment of three years, was set at liberty, on condition of giving up the designs of his associates, a blot on the memory of this great poet, and apparently otherwise. amiable and excellent man, which he has excused as well as he could by alleging that they treated him ill, and would have plundered and starved him. He died in the year 1400, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to which he had had a house on the site where Henry the Seventh's Chapel now stands: so that the reader, in going along the pavement there, is walking where Chaucer once lived.

His person, in advanced life, tended to corpulency; and he had a habit of looking down. In conversation he was modest, and of few words. He was so fond of reading, that he says he took heed of nothing in comparison, and would sit at his books till he dimmed his eyes. The only thing that took him from them was a walk in the fields.

Chaucer (with Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton) is one of the four great English poets; and it is with double justice that he is called the Father of English Poetry; for, as Dante did with Italian, he helped to form its very language. Nay, it burst into luxuriance in his hands, like a sudden month of May. Instead of giving you the idea of an "old" poet, in the sense which the word vulgarly acquires, there is no one, upon acquaintance, who seems so young, consistently with maturity of mind. His poetry rises in the land like a clear morning, in which you see every thing with a rare and crystal distinctness, from the mountain to the minutest flower; towns, solitudes, human beings; open doors, showing you the interior of cottages and of palaces; fancies in the clouds, fairyrings in the grass; and in the midst of all sits the mild poet alone, his eyes on the ground, yet with his heart full of every thing round him, beating, perhaps, with the bosoms of a whole city, whose multitudes are sharing his thoughts with the daisy. His nature. is the greatest poet's nature, omitting nothing in its sympathy (in which respect he is nearer to Shakespeare than either of their two illustrious brethren); and he combines an epic power of grand, comprehensive, and primitive imagery, with that of being contented