Scott’s familiarity with Chaucer appears in his numerous quotations from that poet, but usually the passages are cited to illustrate mediaeval manners rather than for any specifically literary purpose.  Yet there are Chaucer enthusiasts among the characters of Woodstock and Peveril of the Peak.[100] Chaucer’s fame was well enough established so that Scott seems on the whole to have taken his merit for granted, and not to have said much about it except in casual references.[101] Among general readers he must have been comparatively little known, however, notwithstanding the respect paid him by scholars.  In 1805 we find Scott writing to Ellis that his scheme for editing a collection of the British Poets had fallen through, for, he said, “My plan was greatly too liberal to stand the least chance of being adopted by the trade at large, as I wished them to begin with Chaucer.  The fact is, I never expected they would agree to it."[102]

Scott’s review of Godwin’s Life of Chaucer, one of the best known of his periodical essays, is altogether concerned with the manner in which Godwin did his work, and so exhibits Scott’s ideas on the subject of biography and his methods of reviewing rather than his attitude towards Chaucer’s poetry.  His most definite remarks concerning Chaucer are to be found in his comments upon Dryden’s Fables, as for example:  “The Knight’s Tale, whether we consider Chaucer’s original poem, or the spirited and animated version of Dryden, is one of the best pieces of composition in our language";[103] “Of all Chaucer’s multifarious powers, none is more wonderful than the humour with which he touched upon natural frailty, and the truth with which he describes the inward feelings of the human heart."[104] Yet he once called Troilus and Criseyde “a somewhat dull poem."[105] The Cock and the Fox, on the other hand, he speaks of as “a poem which, in grave ironical narrative, liveliness of illustration, and happiness of humorous description, yields to none that ever was written."[106]

In estimating the importance of Scott’s studies on any one period we have to think of them as part of a greater whole.  The wide range of his investigations would evidently make it impossible to expect a complete treatment of all the subjects he might choose to discuss, and we have found, in fact, that his criticism of mediaeval literature led to systematic results in no other lines than those of the ballad and the romance.  But these were large and important matters.  Moreover, to all that he wrote in connection with the Middle Ages there attaches a special interest; for with that work he made his real start in literature; and it reflected the peculiarly delightful vein in his own nature which was constant from youth to age, and which gave to his poems and novels some of their most brilliant qualities.[107]

THE DRAMA