He satirizes evil rather by exposing it and contrasting it with good, than by vehemently denouncing it.  The colours of the pictures are sombre, and the gloom is almost overwhelming, but still it is illumined from time to time with the hope of coming amendment, when the great reformer Piers the Plowman, by which is typified Christ,[5] should appear, who was to remedy all abuses and restore the world to a right condition.  In this sustaining hope he differs from Juvenal, the funereal gloom of whose satires is relieved by no gleam of hope for the future.

Contrast with this the humorous brightness, the laughter, and the light of the surroundings associated with his great contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer.  His very satire is kindly and quaint, like that of Horace, rather than bitterly acidulous.  He raps his age over the knuckles, it is true, for its faults and foibles, but the censor’s face wears a genial smile.  One of his chief attractions for us lies in his bright objectivity.  He never wears his heart on his sleeve like Langland.  He has touches of rare and profound pathos, but these notes of pain are only like undertones of discord to throw the harmony into stronger relief, only like little cloudlets momentarily flitting across the golden sunshine of his humour.

We read Chaucer, as we read Horace, from love of his piquant Epicureanism, and the scintillating satire wherewith he enlivens those matchless pictures of his epoch which he has handed down to us.  Chaucer, as Professor Minto puts it, wrote largely for the court circle.  His verses were first read in tapestried chambers, and to the gracious ear of stately lords and ladies.  It was because he wrote for such an audience that he avoids the introduction of any discordant element in the shape of the deeper and darker social problems of the time.  The same reticence occurs in Horace, writing as he did for the ear of Augustus and Maecenas, and of the fashionable circle thronging the great palace of his patron on the Esquiline.  Is not the historic parallel between the two pairs of writers still further verified?  Chaucer wisely chose the epic form for his greatest poem, because he could introduce thereinto so many distinct qualities of composition, and the woof of racy humour as well as of sprightly satire which he introduces with such consummate art into the texture of his verse is of as fine a character as any in our literature.  In Langland’s great allegory, the satire is earnest, grave and solemn, as though with a sense of deep responsibility; that in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—­nay, in all his poems—­is genial, laughing, and good-natured; tolerant, like Horace’s of human weaknesses, because the author is so keenly conscious of his own.