race,

85

Or, yielding part (which equal knaves demand),

To gain a lawless passport through the land.

From THE BOROUGH

Old Peter Grimes made fishing his employ;

5

His wife he cabined with him and his boy,
And seemed that life laborious to enjoy.
To town came quiet Peter with his fish,
And had of all a civil word and wish.
And took young Peter in his hand to pray:
He left his trade upon the Sabbath day,
But soon the stubborn boy from care broke
loose,

At first refused, then added his abuse; His father's love he scorned, his power defied,

ΙΟ

eye.

Here too the lawless merchant of the

main

died.

CHAUCER (1340?-1400)

Geoffrey Chaucer was born probably in 1340, the son of a London vintner. By April, 1357, he had taken service at the court, perhaps as a page. In 1359 he was a member of the army that was fighting the French in the Hundred Years' War, and was already of sufficient importance to be ransomed from his captors by the king. In 1370 he made the first of several diplomatic journeys to the continent, and in 1372 first went to Italy. In 1374 he was appointed controller of customs for the port of London, and in 1386 sat in Parliament for Kent. In 1389 Richard II appointed him clerk of the king's works, and in 1394 granted him a pension. In 1399 Henry IV succeeded Richard, and at the poet's petition largely increased his pension, and enabled him to spend the last year of his life in comparative affluence. He died in 1400, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Since the court in which Chaucer grew up was in many respects French, it was inevitable that when the young poet began to write his work should show strong traces of foreign literary influence. He early translated part or all of the Romance of the Rose, a famous French allegory, and in the Book of the Duchess (1369), composed at the death of Blanche, wife of John of Gaunt, wrote a poem which is saturated with French influence. When in 1372 he first visited Italy, he came under the spell of the Italian Renaissance, and in the works of Dante (d. 1321), Petrarch (d. 1374), and Boccaccio (d. 1375), found much that was new and inspiring. The effect of Renaissance art and literature on Chaucer's imagination is evident in the work of his second, the so-called Italian period. Here came the House of Fame (?1379), and Troilus and Cressida (?1383), the latter one of his most important works, a character-novel in verse, concerned with the love of Troilus and Diomede for the Trojan girl Cressida. The poem is founded directly on Boccaccio, as is the Legend of Good Women (ca. 1385). Following these came Chaucer's greatest work, the unfinished Canterbury Tales (1385 and after). Here, although French and Italian influences still persist, the inspiration is predominantly English. Chaucer's busy life had brought him in contact with men and women of all sorts, and in the Canterbury Tales he gives us the most brilliant picture ever painted of fourteenth century English life. As the poem is Chaucer's largest work, so until the days of Spenser and Shakespeare it remained the chief glory of English literature.

The best editions of Chaucer for general reading are the Globe (Macmillan), and the Student's (Clarendon Press), although the serious student will have to consult Skeat's monumental Oxford

Edition (Clarendon Press). No adequate life of Chaucer has been written. There is much of value in Lounsbury's Studies in Chaucer (Harper), Root's The Poetry of Chaucer (Houghton Mifflin), and Kittredge's Chaucer and His Poetry (Harvard Univ. Press). Miss Hammond's Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (Macmillan) is invaluable to the serious student. Lowell's essay in My Study Windows (Houghton Mifflin) is suggestive and sympathetic, although slightly inaccurate as to details.

THE ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH POPULAR BALLADS

The great edition of the ballads is that of Francis James Child, in five volumes (Houghton Mifflin). This gives every text of every ballad that Child and his many assistants were able to discover, and is the starting point for all serious study of English balladry. A condensation of this edition in one volume (Cambridge edition, Houghton Mifflin), contains representative texts of practically all the ballads in the larger work, and is prefaced by Kittredge's valuable essay. Gummere's Old English Ballads (Ginn and Co.) is an inexpensive collection with valuable notes. The same author's The Popular Ballad (Houghton Mifflin) discusses the problems of ballad origins and related questions.

SPENSER (1552-1599)

Up to the age of Elizabeth England had produced but one great poet-Chaucer. Edmund Spenser was the second. He was born in London and received his early education in the famous school of the Merchant Tailors, to whose guild his father probably belonged. The family purse must have been lean, for the boy obtained help from a charitable foundation. At Cambridge University, too, he was entered in 1569 as a sizar, or needy student, who rendered certain services in return for food and tuition. At Cambridge Spenser formed the chief of his friendships, with Gabriel Harvey, who had some influence upon Spenser's poetical theory, and figures as one of the characters of The Shepherd's Calendar. After taking his master's degree in 1576 Spenser lived for a time with relatives in Lancashire, and later held two secretarial positions. By 1579 he had entered the service of the great Earl of Leicester, and in that year published The Shepherd's Calendar, a series of pastoral eclogues, one for each of the twelve months. In 1580 he became secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland, and spent the remainder of his life, apart from two visits to London, in Ireland. For some years he held office in Dublin, as a clerk of the Court of