Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/303

274 two bright stars that enlighten the darksome gap of fourteen hundred years between Juvenal and Ariosto. Dante had been at work upon the loftiest part of his Divina Commedia at the precise time that Manning was compiling his Handlyng Synne, the first thoroughly-formed pattern of the New English; the great Italian was now to be followed by a Northern admirer, of a somewhat lower order of genius indeed, but still a bard who ranks very high among poets of the second class. Chaucer was born at London, a city that boasts a more tuneful brood than any single spot in the world; for this early bard was to have for his fellow-townsmen Spenser, Milton, Pope, and Byron. Never has English life been painted in more glowing hues than by Chaucer; his lines will be more long-lived than the frescoes of Orcagna, which are dropping off the Pisan cloister; though poet and painter belong to the same date.

Chaucer has many new forms; such as gossib (as well as godsib), harwed instead of the old heregede, arowe (sagitta) instead of arwe. He led the fashion of doubling the vowel o, for he has both the old stôl and the new stool. He turns the old tôh into tough, akern into acorn. Indeed there are whole sentences in his writings, espe&shy;cially in the Parson's prose sermon, that need but the change of a few letters to be good modern English, spelling and all. He follows Manning's way of writing syn, or rather sin, for quoniam. In one of the earliest sentences of the Parson's attack on Pride, we find the words, ‘those bountees. . . . that he hath not;’ but this corruption as yet comes very seldom.

We see many new phrases like, ''what ails him? now''