feasts, their dwellings, their language, their habits, and their manners.  Amid all the changes in human thought and in social institutions the characters appeal to our common humanity, essentially the same under all human conditions.  The men and women of the fourteenth century love and hate, eat and drink, laugh and talk, as they do in the nineteenth.  They delight, as we do, in the varieties of dress, of parade, and luxurious feasts.  Although the form of these has changed, they are alive to the same sentiments which move us.  They like fun and jokes and amusement as much as we.  They abhor the same class of defects which disgust us,—­hypocrisies, shams, lies.  The inner circle of their friendship is the same as ours to-day, based on sincerity and admiration.  There is the same infinite variety in character, and yet the same uniformity.  The human heart beats to the same sentiments that it does under all civilizations and conditions of life.  No people can live without friendship and sympathy and love; and these are ultimate sentiments of the soul, which are as eternal as the ideas of Plato.  Why do the Psalms of David, written for an Oriental people four thousand years ago, excite the same emotions in the minds of the people of England or France or America that they did among the Jews?  It is because they appeal to our common humanity, which never changes,—­the same to-day as it was in the beginning, and will be to the end.  It is only form and fashion which change; men remain the same.  The men and women of the Bible talked nearly the same as we do, and seem to have had as great light on the primal principles of wisdom and truth and virtue.  Who can improve on the sagacity and worldly wisdom of the Proverbs of Solomon?  They have a perennial freshness, and appeal to universal experience.  It is this fidelity to nature which is one of the great charms of Shakspeare.  We quote his brief sayings as expressive of what we feel and know of the certitudes of our moral and intellectual life.  They will last forever, under every variety of government, of social institutions, of races, and of languages.  And they will last because these every-day sentiments are put in such pithy, compressed, unique, and novel form, like the Proverbs of Solomon or the sayings of Epictetus.  All nations and ages alike recognize the moral wisdom in the sayings of those immortal sages whose writings have delighted and enlightened the world, because they appeal to consciousness or experience.

Now it must be confessed that the poetry of Chaucer does not abound in the moral wisdom and spiritual insight and profound reflections on the great mysteries of human life which stand out so conspicuously in the writings of Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, Goethe, and other first-class poets.  He does not describe the inner life, but the outward habits and condition of the people of his times.  He is not serious enough, nor learned enough, to enter upon the discussion of those high themes which agitated the schools and