himself firmly in fact, and looked out upon the world in a half-humourous, half-melancholy mood.  Spenser had but little knowledge of men as men; the cardinal virtues were the personages he was acquainted with; in everything he was “high fantastical,” and, as a consequence, he exhibits neither humour nor pathos.  Chaucer was thoroughly national; his characters, place them where he may,—­in Thebes or Tartary,—­are natives of one or other of the English shires.  Spenser’s genius was country-less as Ariel; search ever so diligently, you will not find an English daisy in all his enchanted forests.  Chaucer was tolerant of everything, the vices not excepted; morally speaking, an easy-going man, he took the world as it came, and did not fancy himself a whit better than his fellows.  Spenser was a Platonist, and fed his grave spirit on high speculations and moralities.  Severe and chivalrous, dreaming of things to come, unsuppled by luxury, unenslaved by passion, somewhat scornful and self-sustained, it needed but a tyrannous king, an electrical political atmosphere, and a deeper interest in theology to make a Puritan of him, as these things made a Puritan of Milton.  The differences between Chaucer and Spenser are seen at a glance in their portraits.  Chaucer’s face is round, good-humoured, constitutionally pensive, and thoughtful.  You see in it that he has often been amused, and that he may easily be amused again.  Spenser’s is of sharper and keener feature, disdainful, and breathing that severity which appertains to so many of the Elizabethan men.  A fourteenth-century child, with delicate prescience, would have asked Chaucer to assist her in a strait, and would not have been disappointed.  A sixteenth-century child in like circumstances would have shrunk from drawing on herself the regards of the sterner-looking man.  We can trace the descent of the Chaucerian face and genius in Shakspeare and Scott, of the Spenserian in Milton and Wordsworth.  In our day, Mr. Browning takes after Chaucer, Mr. Tennyson takes after Spenser.

Hazlitt, writing of the four great English poets, tells us, Chaucer’s characteristic is intensity, Spenser’s remoteness, Milton’s sublimity, and Shakspeare’s everything.  The sentence is epigrammatic and memorable enough; but so far as Chaucer is concerned, it requires a little explanation.  He is not intense, for instance, as Byron is intense, or as Wordsworth is intense.  He does not see man like the one, nor nature like the other.  He would not have cared much for either of these poets.  And yet, so far as straightforwardness in dealing with a subject, and complete though quiet realisation of it goes to make up intensity of poetic mood, Chaucer amply justifies his critic.  There is no wastefulness or explosiveness about the old writer.  He does his work silently, and with no appearance of effort.  His poetry shines upon us like a May morning; but the streak over the eastern hill, the dew on the grass, the wind that bathes the