It has also all the extravagance and the utmost licentiousness of comic humour, equally arising out of the manners of the time.  In this too Chaucer resembled Boccaccio that he excelled in both styles, and could pass at will “from grave to gay, from lively to severe”; but he never confounded the two styles together (except from that involuntary and unconscious mixture of the pathetic and humorous, which is almost always to be found in nature,) and was exclusively taken up with what he set about, whether it was jest or earnest.  The Wife of Bath’s Prologue (which Pope has very admirably modernised) is, perhaps, unequalled as a comic story.  The Cock and the Fox is also excellent for lively strokes of character and satire.  January and May is not so good as some of the others.  Chaucer’s versification, considering the time at which he wrote, and that versification is a thing in a great degree mechanical, is not one of his least merits.  It has considerable strength and harmony, and its apparent deficiency in the latter respect arises chiefly from the alterations which have since taken place in the pronunciation or mode of accenting the words of the language.  The best general rule for reading him is to pronounce the final e, as in reading Italian.

It was observed in the last Lecture that painting describes what the object is in itself, poetry what it implies or suggests.  Chaucer’s poetry is not, in general, the best confirmation of the truth of this distinction, for his poetry is more picturesque and historical than almost any other.  But there is one instance in point which I cannot help giving in this place.  It is the story of the three thieves who go in search of Death to kill him, and who meeting with him, are entangled in their fate by his words, without knowing him.  In the printed catalogue to Mr. West’s (in some respects very admirable) picture of Death on the Pale Horse, it is observed, that “In poetry the same effect is produced by a few abrupt and rapid gleams of description, touching, as it were with fire, the features and edges of a general mass of awful obscurity; but in painting, such indistinctness would be a defect, and imply that the artist wanted the power to pourtray the conceptions of his fancy.  Mr. West was of opinion that to delineate a physical form, which in its moral impression would approximate to that of the visionary Death of Milton, it was necessary to endow it, if possible, with the appearance of super-human strength and energy.  He has therefore exerted the utmost force and perspicuity of his pencil on the central figure.”—­One might suppose from this, that the way to represent a shadow was to make it as substantial as possible.  Oh, no!  Painting has its prerogatives, (and high ones they are) but they lie in representing the visible, not the invisible.  The moral attributes of Death are powers and effects of an infinitely wide and general description, which no individual or physical