not of the poet. But his wit his not all his charm. He glows with passion in the Epistle of Eloisa, and displays a lofty feeling, much above that of the satirist and the man of the world, in his Prologue to Cato, and his Epistle to Lord Oxford *. I know not how to designate the possessor of such gifts but by the name of a genuine poet t

qualem vix repperit unum Millibus in multis hominum consultus Apollo.

AUSONIUS.

[* Mr.Campbell might have added his noble conclusion to The Dunciad, which is written in the highest vein of poetry, and exhibits a genius that wanted direction, opportunity, or inclination, rather than cultivation or increase of strength.]

[† Mr. Bowles' position is this, that Pope saw rural or field nature through what Dryden expressively calls the spectacles of books: that he did not see it for himself, as Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Milton saw it, as it was seen by Thomson and Cowper-that his country nature is by reflection, cold, unwarming, and dead-coloured-that he did not make what Addison calls additions to nature, as every great poet has donethat Dr. Blacklock's descriptive nature is as good, who was blind from his birth-that flocks that graze the tender green in Pope graze audibly in true descriptive writersand that his Paradise had been a succession of alleys, platforms and quincunxes-a Hagley or a Stowe, not an Eden, as Milton has made it. All this is true enough, but its importance has been over-rated. Pope is still a great poet, though he did not dwell long in the mazes of fancy, but stooped, as he expresses it, to truth, and moralised his song-that he made sense, or wit, or intellectuality hold the place of mere description, and gave us peopled pictures rather than landscapes with people. True it is too that imagination (a nobler kind of fancy) is the first great quality of a poet-that when it is found united to all the lesser qualities required, it forms what Cowley calls poetry and sanctity. Mr. Campbell has properly extended the offices of poetry, and written a defence of Pope, which will exist as long as Eloisa's Letter, or any poem of its great writer.

Gray, whose scattered touches of external nature are exquisitely true, has laid it down as a rule that description, the most graceful ornament of poetry as he calls it, should never form the bulk or subject of a poem : Pope, who was not very happy in his strokes from landscape nature that where it forms the body of a poem, it is as absurd as a feast made up of sauces; while Swift, who

Of the poets in succession to Pope I have spoken in their respective biographies.

knew nothing of trees and streams, and lawns and meads, objected to Thomson's philosophical poem that it was all description and nothing was doing, whereas Milton engaged men in actions of the highest importance.

To try poetry by the sister art.-in painting we see that a mere landscape, is of less value than a landscape with figures and a story, that is, where the art of both, in representing nature, is the same. An historical landscape, like the subject of Joshua commanding the sun to stand still, where high acts are performed in alliance with inanimate nature, seems to meet the ideas of Pope, of Swift, and of Gray. "Selection," says Fuseli, falsely, "is the invention of a landscape painter."

To diversify and animate his poems, Thomson had recourse to episodes of human interest. The first Shipwreck was devoid of story, it was all description; as Falconer left it, there was an action to heighten and relieve the nature, that made description the secondary object of the

poem.

Had not the notes to this Essay already run to a disproportionate length, we had been tempted to extract what Crabbe says in defence of Pope, and that portion of poetry he himself excelled in; to have quoted Lord Byron's exaggerated praises, and Mr. Southey's depreciatory notice of the same writer. We must find room, however, for Mr. Bowles's short character from his Final Appeal, observing generally on this subject, that in lowering the rank of the poetry that Pope sustains, too much stress has been laid upon Horace's exclusion of himself from the name of a poet on the score of his Epistles and Satires, which was a becoming modesty too literally understood. When a man lowers himself, there are always some ready to take him at his own valuation.

"As a poet," says Mr. Bowles, "I sought not to depreciate, but discriminate, and assign to him his proper rank and station in his art among English poets; below Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton, in the highest order of imagination or impassioned poetry; but above Dryden, Lucretius, and Horace, in moral and satirical. Inferior to Dryden in lyric sublimity; equal to him in painting characters from real life (such as are so powerfully delineated in Absalom and Achitophel); but superior to him in passion-for what ever equalled, or ever will approach, in its kind, the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard? In consequence of the exquisite pathos of this epistle, I have assigned Pope a poetical rank far above Ovid. I have placed him above Horace, in consequence of the perfect finish of his satires and moral poems; but in descriptive poetry, such as Windsor Forest, beneath Cowper or Thomson."Final Appeal, 1825, p. 55.]

GEOFFREY CHAUCER, according to his own account, was born in London, and the year 1328 is generally assigned as the date of his birth. The name is Norman, and, according to Francis Thynne, the antiquarian, is one of those, on the roll of Battle Abbey, which came in with William the Conqueror*. It is uncertain at which of the universities he studied. Warton and others, who allege that it was at Oxford, adduce no proof of their assertion; and the signature of Philogenet of Cambridge, which the poet himself assumes in one of his early pieces, as it was fictitious in the name, might be equally so in the place; although it leaves it rather to be conjectured that the latter university had the honour of his education.

The precise time at which he first attracted the notice of his munificent patrons, Edward III. and John of Gaunt, cannot be ascertained; but if his poem, entitled The Dreme, be rightly supposed to be an epithalamium on the nuptials of the latter prince with Blanche heiress of Lancaster, he must have enjoyed the court patronage in his thirty-first year. The same poem contains an allusion to the poet's own attachment to a lady at court, whom he afterwards married. She was maid of honour to Philippa, queen of Edward │III., and a younger sister of Catherine Swinford†,

* Vide Thynne's animadversions on Speght's edition of Chaucer, in the Rev. J. H. Todd's Illustrations of Gower and Chaucer, p. 18. Thynne calls in question Speght's supposition of Chaucer being the son of a vintner, which Mr. Godwin, in his Life of Chaucer, has adopted. Respecting the arms of the poet, Thynne (who was a herald) farther remarks to Speght, "you set down that some heralds are of opinion that he did not descend from any great house, whiche they gather by his armes it is a slender conjecture; for as honourable howses and of as great antiquytye have borne as mean armes as Chaucer, and yet Chaucer's armes are not so mean eyther for colour, chardge, or particion, as some will make them " If indeed the fact of Chaucer's residence in the Temple could be proved, instead of resting on mere rumour, it would be tolerable evidence of his high birth and fortune; for only young men of that description were anciently admitted to the inns of court. But unfortunately for the claims of the Inner Temple to the honour of Chaucer's residence, Mr. Thynne declares "it most certaine to be gathered by cyrcumstances of recordes, that the lawyers were not of the Temple till the latter parte of the reygne of Edw. III., at which tyme Chaucer was a grave manne, holden in greate credyt, and employed in embassye."

+ Catherine was the widow of Sir John Swinford, and daughter of Payne de Rouet, king at arms to the province of Guienne. It appears from other evidence, however, that Chaucer's wife's name was Philippa Pykard. Mr. Tyrwhitt explains the circumstance of the sisters having different names, by supposing that the father and

who was first the mistress, and ultimately the wife of John of Gaunt.

By this connexion Chaucer acquired the powerful support of the Lancastrian family; and during his life his fortune fluctuated with theirs. Tradition has assigned to him a lodge, near the royal abode of Woodstock, by the park gate, where it is probable that he composed some of his early works; and there are passages in these which strikingly coincide with the scenery of his supposed habitation. There is also reason to presume that he accompanied his warlike monarch to France in the year 1359; and from the record of his evidence in a military court, which has been lately discovered, we find that he gave testimony to a fact which he witnessed in that kingdom in the capacity of a soldier*. But the expedition of that year, which ended in the peace of Bretigné, gave little opportunity of seeing military service; and he certainly never resumed the profession of

arms.

In the year 1367 he received from Edward III. a pension of twenty marks per annum, a sum which in those times might probably be equivalent to two or three hundred pounds at the present day. In the patent for this annuity he is styled by the king valettus noster. The name valettus was given to young men of the highest quality before they were knighted, though not as a badge of service. Chaucer, however, at the date of this pension, was not a young man, being then in his thirty-ninth year. He did not acquire the title of scutifer, or esquire, till five years after, when he was appointed joint envoy to Genoa with Sir James Pronan and Sir John de Mari. It has been conjectured, that after finishing the business of this mission he paid a reverential visit to Petrarch, who was that year at Padua†. his eldest daughter Catherine might bear the name of De Rouet, from some estate in their possession; while the family name Pykard was retained by the younger daughter Philippa, who was Chaucer's wife.

[Chaucer was made prisoner at the siege of Retters, in France, in 1359, as appears from his depositions in the famous controversy between Lord Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor upon the right to bear the shield azure a bend or,' which had been assumed by Grosvenor, and which after a long suit he was obliged to discontinue. The roll of the depositions is in the Tower, and was printed in 1832, by Sir N. Harris Nicolas (2 vols. folio.) See also, Quarterly Review, No. cxi.]

Mr. Tyrwhitt is upon the whole inclined to doubt of this poetical meeting; and De Sade, who, in his Mémoires pour la Vie de Petrarque, conceived he should be able to

B

The fact, however, of an interview, so pleasing to the imagination, rests upon no certain evidence; nor are there even satisfactory proofs that he ever went on his Italian embassy.

His genius and connexions seem to have kept him in prosperity during the whole of Edward III.'s reign, and during the period of John of Gaunt's influence in the succeeding one. From Edward he had a grant of a pitcher of wine a day, in 1374, and was made comptroller of the small customs of wool and of the small customs of wine in the port of London. In the next year the king granted him the wardship of Sir Simon Staplegate's heir, for which he received £104. The following year he received some forfeited wool to the value of £71. 4s. 6d.—sums probably equal in effective value to twenty times their modern denomination. In the last year of Edward he was appointed joint envoy to France with Sir Guichard Dangle and Sir Richard Stan, or Sturrey, to treat of a marriage between Richard Prince of Wales and the daughter of the French king. His circumstances during this middle part of his life must have been honourable and opulent; and they enabled him, as he tells us in his Testament of Love, to maintain a plentiful hospitality; but the picture of his fortunes was sadly reversed by the decline of John of Gaunt's influence at the court of Richard II., but more immediately by the poet's connexion with an obnoxious political party in the city. This faction, whose resistance to an arbitary court was dignified with the name of a rebellion, was headed by John of Northampton, or Comberton, who in religious tenets was connected with the followers of Wickliffe, and in political interests with the Duke of Lancaster; a connexion which accounts for Chaucer having been implicated in the business. His pension, it is true, was renewed under Richard; and an addi

prove that it took place, did not live to fulfil his promise. The circumstance which, taken collaterally with the fact of Chaucer's appointment to go to Italy, has been considered as giving the strongest probability to the English poet's having visited Petrarch, is that Chaucer makes one of the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales declare, that he learned his story from the worthy clerk of Padua. The story is that of Patient Grisilde: which, in fact, originally belonged to Boccaccio, and was only translated into Latin by Petrarch. It is not easy to explain, as Mr. Tyrwhitt remarks, why Chaucer should have proclaimed his obligation to Petrarch, while he really owed it to Boccaccio. According to Mr. Godwin, it was to have an occasion of boasting of his friendship with the Italian laureat. But why does he not boast of it in his own person? He makes the clerk of Oxford declare that he had his story from the clerk of Padua; but he does not say that he had it himself from that quarter. Mr. Godwin, however, believes that he shadows forth himself under the character of the lean scholar. This is surely improbable; when the poet in another place describes himself as round and jolly, while the poor Oxford scholar is lank and meagre. If Chaucer really was corpulent, it was indeed giving but a shadow of himself to paint his figure as very lean: but why should he give himself a double existence, and describe both the jolly substance and the meagre shadow?

tional allowance of twenty marks per annum was made to him in lieu of his daily pitcher of wine. He was also continued in his office of comptroller, and allowed to execute it by deputy, at a time when there is every reason to believe that he must have been in exile. It is certain, however, that he was compelled to fly from the kingdom on account of his political connexions; and retired first to Hainault, then to France, and finally to Zealand. He returned to England, but was arrested and committed to prison. The coincidence of the time of his severest usage with that of the Duke of Gloucester's power, has led to a fair supposition that that usurper was personally a greater enemy to the poet than King Richard himself, whose disposition towards him might have been softened by the good offices of Anne of Bohemia, a princess never mentioned by Chaucer but in terms of the warmest panegyric.

While he was abroad, his circumstances had been impoverished by his liberality to some of his fellow fugitives; and his effects at home had been cruelly embezzled by those entrusted with their management, who endeavoured, as he tells us, to make him perish for absolute want.

In 1388, while yet a prisoner, he was obliged to dispose of his two pensions, which were all the resources now left to him by his persecutors. As the price of his release from imprisonment, he was obliged to make a confession respecting the late conspiracy. It is not known what he revealed; certainly nothing to the prejudice of John of Gaunt, since that prince continued to be his friend. To his acknowledged partisans, who had betrayed and tried to starve him during his banishment, he owed no fidelity. It is true, that extorted evidence is one of the last ransoms which a noble mind would wish to pay for liberty; but before we blame Chaucer for making any confession, we should consider how fair and easy the lessons of uncapitulating fortitude may appear on the outside of a prison, and yet how hard it may be to read them by the light of a dungeon. As far as dates can be guessed at in so obscure a transaction, his liberation took place after Richard had shaken off the domineering party of Gloucester, and had begun to act for himself. Chaucer's political errors-and he considered his share in the late conspiracy as errors of judgment, though not of intention-had been committed while Richard was a minor, and the acknowledgment of them might seem less humiliating when made to the monarch himself, than to an usurping faction ruling in his name. He was charged too, by his loyalty, to make certain disclosures important to the peace of the kingdom; and his duty as a subject, independent of personal considerations, might well be put in competition with ties to associates already broken by their treachery*.

For my trothe and my conscience," he says in his Testament of Love, "bene witnesse to me bothe, that