Bounded as is my space, I must yet find room for an example of Chaucer’s virtue, as I have given examples to show the virtue of the great classics.  I feel disposed to say that a single line is enough to show the charm of Chaucer’s verse; that merely one line like this—­

  “O martyr souded[95] in virginitee!”

has a virtue of manner and movement such as we shall not find in all the verse of romance-poetry;—­but this is saying nothing.  The virtue is such as we shall not find, perhaps, in all English poetry, outside the poets whom I have named as the special inheritors of Chaucer’s tradition.  A single line, however, is too little if we have not the strain of Chaucer’s verse well in our memory; let us take a stanza.  It is from The Prioress’s Tale, the story of the Christian child murdered in a Jewry—­

  “My throte is cut unto my nekke-bone
  Saide this child, and as by way of kinde
  I should have deyd, yea, longe time agone;
  But Jesu Christ, as ye in bookes finde,
  Will that his glory last and be in minde,
  And for the worship of his mother dere
  Yet may I sing O Alma loud and clere.”

Wordsworth has modernized this Tale, and to feel how delicate and evanescent is the charm of verse, we have only to read Wordsworth’s first three lines of this stanza after Chaucer’s—­

  “My throat is cut unto the bone, I trow,
  Said this young child, and by the law of kind
  I should have died, yea, many hours ago.”

The charm is departed.  It is often said that the power of liquidness and fluidity in Chaucer’s verse was dependent upon a free, a licentious dealing with language, such as is now impossible; upon a liberty, such as Burns too enjoyed, of making words like neck, bird, into a dissyllable by adding to them, and words like cause, rhyme, into a dissyllable by sounding the e mute.  It is true that Chaucer’s fluidity is conjoined with this liberty, and is admirably served by it; but we ought not to say that it was dependent upon it.  It was dependent upon his talent.  Other poets with a like liberty do not attain to the fluidity of Chaucer; Burns himself does not attain to it.  Poets, again, who have a talent akin to Chaucer’s, such as Shakespeare or Keats, have known how to attain to his fluidity without the like liberty.

And yet Chaucer is not one of the great classics.  His poetry transcends and effaces, easily and without effort, all the romance-poetry of Catholic Christendom; it transcends and effaces all the English poetry contemporary with it, it transcends and effaces all the English poetry subsequent to it down to the age of Elizabeth.  Of such avail is poetic truth of substance, in its natural and necessary union with poetic truth of style.  And yet, I say, Chaucer is not one of the great classics.  He has not their accent.  What is wanting to him is suggested by the mere mention of the name of the first great classic of Christendom, the immortal poet who died eighty years before Chaucer,—­Dante.  The accent of such verse as