ITALIAN INFLUENCE.—­From a literary point of view, the period of his birth was remarkable for the strong influence of Italian letters, which first having made its entrance into France, now, in natural course of progress, found its way into England.  Dante had produced,

      ... in the darkness prest,
    From his own soul by worldly weights, ...

the greatest poem then known to modern Europe, and the most imaginative ever written.  Thus the Italian sky was blazing with splendor, while the West was still in the morning twilight.  The Divina Commedia was written half a century before the Canterbury Tales.

Boccaccio was then writing his Filostrato, which was to be Chaucer’s model in the Troilus and Creseide, and his Decameron, which suggested the plan of the Canterbury Tales.  His Teseide is also said to be the original of the Knight’s Tale.  Petrarch, “the worthy clerke” from whom Chaucer is said to have learned a story or two in Italy for his great work, was born in 1304, and was also a star of the first magnitude in that Italian galaxy.

Indeed, it is here worthy of a passing remark, that from that early time to a later period, many of the great products of English poetry have been watered by silver rills of imaginative genius from a remote Italian source.  Chaucer’s indebtedness has just been noticed.  Spenser borrowed his versification and not a little of his poetic handling in the Faery Queen from Ariosto.  Milton owes to Dante some of his conceptions of heaven and hell in his Paradise Lost, while his Lycidas, Arcades, Allegro and Penseroso, may be called Italian poems done into English.

In the time of Chaucer, this Italian influence marks the extended relations of English letters; and, serving to remove the trammels of the French, it gave to the now vigorous and growing English that opportunity of development for which it had so long waited.  Out of the serfdom and obscurity to which it had been condemned by the Normans, it had sprung forth in reality, as in name, the English language.  Books, few at the best, long used in Latin or French, were now demanded by English mind, and being produced in answer to the demand.

THE FOUNDER OF THE LITERATURE.—­But there was still wanted a man who could use the elements and influences of the time—­a great poet—­a maker—­a creator of literature.  The language needed a forming, controlling, fixing hand.  The English mind needed a leader and master, English imagination a guide, English literature a father.

The person who answered to this call, and who was equal to all these demands, was Chaucer.  But he was something more.  He claimed only to be a poet, while he was to figure in after times as historian, philosopher, and artist.

The scope of this work does not permit an examination of Chaucer’s writings in detail, but the position we have taken will be best illustrated by his greatest work, the Canterbury Tales.  Of the others, a few preliminary words only need be said.  Like most writers in an early literary period, Chaucer began with translations, which were extended into paraphrases or versions, and thus his “’prentice hand” gained the practice and skill with which to attempt original poems.