Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/23

 mediæval Italy and it is a most significant token of Chaucer's pre-eminent originality that, while Gower and the rest had only been inspired to imitate what was bad in the great models, he, on the contrary, merely derived inspiration and solace from their music, assimilated what was noble in it, and carefully prepared a breezier and healthier poetic form of his own. What is grandest and best in Chaucer is Chaucer's exclusively. No better proof can be had of his merit as the morning star of the modern school than a careful comparison of him, first with Boccaccio, then with Dante. All the limpid flow of narrative, the concentration and pomp of subject, all the lighter humour and sparkle, are to be found in the "Decameron." All the dramatic intensity, the quaint but tender realism, are (with mighty qualities super-added) to be discovered in Dante. But the quaint saline humour, the universality of sympathy, the childlike love of nature, and the supreme piteousness of modern poetry, dawned with the divine author of the "Canterbury Tales." Chaucer was emphatically the poet of the bourgeoisie, just as Shakspere and his brethren were the poets of the feudal idea; but with all these writers alike, with the author of the "Wife of Bath" as well as with the creator of Falstaff, humanity was beginning to get such a hearing for itself, and notably on the humorous side of the question, as would be certain in the long-run to blend both ideas, that of feudalism and that of the bourgeoisie, into the great modern sentiment of popular rights, duties, and affections.The great dramatists of the reign of Elizabeth, following in Chaucer's footsteps, appear, under some awful demoniac influence (for individually these men were destitute of beneficence), to have prepared for modern contemplation an unequalled gallery