were unable in his prose to save his ear from obsession by the cadences of the pulpit. His treatise on the Astrolabe is learned matter reduced to English for the instruction of a child, the Parson's Tale and the translation of Boethius, his other prose works, are bald sermons, with none of the glitter and melody of his poorest line of verse. English prose had really no standing in an age when there were few readers who could not read Latin.

The original work done by Chaucer on the themes of the old romances was more deadly than his ridicule to the supremacy of the ministrel. In the Knight's Tale and Troilus and Cressida he showed what could be made of the legends of Thebes and Troy. In the handling of his material as well as in the new elevation of every syllable of his verse to value and dignity, he Superseded for ever the artless garrulity and tumbling periods of the ministrel poets. The Chaucerians of the fifteenth century, from Lydgate onwards, appropriated more and more legendary material, keeping generally in their longer poems to the two famous metres of their master, the seven-lined "Troilus" stanza and the decasyllabic couplet. These are measures intended to be read rather than sung; their adoption marks the triumph of the written over the spoken word, and heralds the later conquests of prose.

Although his prose writing merits no particular notice, it is difficult to pass over the name of Chaucer without marking the high pitch of perfection to which he brought the art of narration in verse. Not until centuries after his time could there be found in English prose the equivalent of his spirited incident, his delicate.

characterization, his dramatic realism, his sly gentle humour. It is not merely that he succeeded, alone among the writers of his age and nation, in ridding himself of the allegorical fetters that cramped the growth of English literature even in the fifteenth century. It is not only that he had an unexampled dramatic genius, which prompted him to substitute for the statical scheme of the Decameron a brilliant dynamical scheme of his own, instinct with life and grace. The greatness of Chaucer's dramatic power has left its impress on his story-telling in a hundred subtleties of inspired observation, to be equalled only by the sudden startling dramatic felicities of the great romantic playwrights. But first of all he was a great narrative artist, incomparably the greatest of an age that loved story-telling and knew nothing of the drama. He is a master of all those effects, beyond the scope of the dramatist proper, to be obtained from the apposite intrusion of himself as narrator, pointing a moral or interposing a reflection, laughing or criticizing, expressing incredulity or sympathy. Thus, in the Prologue, he hastens to dissent from the Sumpnour's cynical contempt for the archdeacon's curse, and adds, with humorous ambiguity, his own conviction—

"For curs wol slee right as assoillyng saveth.”

In the Knight's Tale, he refuses, on the ground that he is no "divinister," to speculate on the fate of the soul of Arcite :

"His spirit chaunged was, and wentè ther
As I cam never, I can nat tellen wher."

In Troilus and Cressida he is constantly at the reader's

elbow, disclaiming skill in love, discussing the conduct of the heroine, defending her from the charge of immodesty in the ready bestowal of her affections, pleading for her even in her infidelity,—

"For she so sory was for hir untrouthe,

Y-wis, I wolde excuse hir yet for routhe."

And some of the most beautiful of his reflective passages are interpolated as his own criticisms on the narrative; thus, in the Franklin's Tale, he tells of the marriage of Arviragus and Dorigen, adding the thought that it suggests to him,—

"For o thing, syres, saufly dar I seye,

That frendes everich other motte obeye,
If they wille longè holdè companye.

Love wol nought ben constreyned by maystrie.
When maystrie cometh, the god of love anon
Beteth on his winges, and fare wel, he is gon."

Yet when he comes, in the Clerk's Tale, to tell of a love that was cruelly "constrained by mastery" and survived it, he is at no loss for a criticism; after the heartrending pathos of the story of Griselda, he turns lightly, in the inimitable Envoy, on the "arch-wives" of his own day, satirically counselling them against taking Griselda for a model, and warning their husbands that the story is an insecure precedent.

The illuminative play of his own thought and humour around the incidents of the stories he tells so tersely and vividly gives to Chaucer much of his greatness as a narrator. But he wrote in verse, and prose was slow to learn from him. Here and there in his compilation Sir Thomas Malory took leave to indulge his own knightly

thoughts. In the chapter entitled "How True Love is likened to Summer " (book xviii. ch. 25) such a passage occurs, and the sentiments sound strangely reminiscent of Chaucer. But the earlier prose romances for the most part kept to the beaten path, and chronicled deeds; nothing like the consciousness and freedom of Chaucer's treatment, nothing of his vigilantly critical attitude towards his own art, is to be found in the dream-like formal cavalcade of early prose romance.

In the fifteenth century both of the ancestors of the modern novel-that is, the novella or short pithy story after the manner of the Italians, and the romance of chivalry-appear in an English prose dress. But it was 'not a translation of Boccaccio, or of any of the approved masters of the Italian type, that first found favour with the English people. Direct prose translations of the chief Italian novels were plentiful in the reign of Elizabeth; for the two preceding centuries the influence of Boccaccio was felt only by scholars and poets, and the reputation of his Latin works overshadowed the merits of the Decameron, which was more esteemed as a storehouse of tractable material than as a model for imitation. Thus two of the most famous of his novels, the stories of Tancred and Ghismonda, and of Titus and Gisippus, were rendered in English at the beginning of the sixteenth century by William Walter, servant to Sir Henry Marney, and printed by Wynkyn de Worde. Both stories are given in Chaucerian metres, and the translator works, not from the Italian original, but from the Latin versions of Leonardo Aretino and Bandello respectively. The direct influence of Boccaccio belongs to the later

sixteenth_century.

His secular zest and his satires on the clergy would hardly commend his works for translation by a medieval clerk, or obtain him credit with readers accustomed chiefly to the grave prose of sermons or lives of the saints. It was the Gesta Romanorum, a Latin collection of stories, largely of Oriental origin, compiled probably about the beginning of the fourteenth century, that was translated into English prose in the reign of Henry VI., and printed by Wynkyn de Worde at the beginning of the next century.

In this work, allegory, which flourished all through the Middle Ages like some deadly carnivorous plant, entrapping all bright careless forms of life, and converting them to nutriment for its own vegetable substance, appropriated to itself the most volatile of the jests and anecdotes of medieval society. The stories are drawn from very diverse sources; some of them are characteristically Oriental; some of them contain incidents of Roman history, refracted through the medieval imagination; some record only a witty response or wise saying, others again bear the mark of an original homiletic intent. All alike are applied, in the lengthy and violent "moralizations" that are appended, to the uses of pastoral theology and the illustration of Christian mysteries. A single moralization may serve as a sample. In the original Latin Gesta is preserved the story, told by Cicero, of the man whose friend begged for a sprig of the tree on which his three wives had hanged themselves. The tree, it is stated in the moral, is the cross of Christ. The three wives are pride, lust of the heart, and lust of the eye. He who begged for a sprig is any