In these attacks on ecclesiastics and ecclesiastical abuses, Chaucer should be studied with Wyclif and the early reformers, although he would not have gone so far as they, and led, unlike them, a worldly life.  Thus by these poems he has rendered a service to his country, outside his literary legacy, which has always been held in value.  The father of English poetry belonged to the school of progress and of inquiry, like his great contemporaries on the Continent.  But while he paints the manners, customs, and characters of the fourteenth century, he does not throw light on the great ideas which agitated or enslaved the age.  He is too real and practical for that.  He describes the outward, not the inner life.  He was not serious enough—­I doubt if he was learned enough—­to enter into the disquisitions of schoolmen, or the mazes of the scholastic philosophy, or the meditations of almost inspired sages.  It is not the joys of heaven or the terrors of hell on which he discourses, but of men and women as they lived around him, in their daily habits and occupations.  We must go to Wyclif if we would know the theological or philosophical doctrines which interested the learned.  Chaucer only tells how monks and friars lived, not how they speculated or preached.  We see enough, however, to feel that he was emancipated from the ideas of the Middle Ages, and had cast off their gloom, their superstition, and their despair.  The only things he liked of those dreary times were their courts of love and their chivalric glories.

I do not propose to analyze the poetry of Chaucer, or enter upon a critical inquiry as to his relative merits in comparison with the other great poets.  It is sufficient for me to know that critics place him very high as an original poet, although it is admitted that he drew much of his material from French and Italian authors.  He was, for his day, a great linguist.  He had travelled extensively, and could speak Latin, French, and Italian with fluency.  He knew Petrarch and other eminent Italians.  One is amazed that in such an age he could have written so well, for he had no great models to help him in his own language.  If occasionally indecent, he is not corrupting.  He never deliberately disseminates moral poison; and when he speaks of love, he treats almost solely of the simple and genuine emotions of the heart.

The best criticism that I have read of Chaucer’s poetry is that of Adolphus William Ward; although as a biography it is not so full or so interesting as that of Godwin or even Morley.  In no life that I have read are the mental characteristics of our poet so ably drawn,—­“his practical good sense,” his love of books, his still deeper love of nature, his naivete, the readiness of his description, the brightness of his imagery, the easy flow of his diction, the vividness with which he describes character; his inventiveness, his readiness of illustration, his musical rhythm, his gaiety and cheerfulness, his vivacity and joyousness, his pathos and tenderness, his keen sense of the ridiculous and power of satire, without being bitter, so that his wit and fun are harmless, and perpetually pleasing.