Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/552

490 literature emerged from its obscurity, and with an utterance somewhat changed—yet it is unmistakably the same voice—resumes its interrupted lesson and its broken song.

Chaucer (1328?–1400).—Holding a position high above all other writers of early English is Geoffrey Chaucer. He is the first in time, and, after Shakespeare, perhaps the first in genius, among the great poets of the English-speaking race. He is reverently called the "Father of English Poetry."

Chaucer stands between two ages, the mediæval and the modern. He felt not only the influences of the age of Feudalism which was passing away, but also those of the new age of learning and freedom which was dawning. It is because he reflects his surroundings so faithfully in his writings, that these are so valuable as interpreters of the period in which he lived. Chaucer's greatest work is his Canterbury Tales, wherein the poet represents himself as one of a company of story-telling pilgrims who have set out from London on a journey to the tomb of Thomas Becket, at Canterbury.

Wycliffe and the Reformation (1324–1384).—Foremost among the reformers and religious writers of the period under review was