The Father of English Poetry.

Exegi monumentum ære perennius.-HORACE, Lib. III, Car. xxx.

ENGLISH literature is the Westminster Abbey of England's intel lectual life. Far down, at the end of the longest aisle, stands the first English monument of an English mind. The olden orthography, the obsolete words, the quaint pronunciation, like the brown moss-spots upon the marble, are the finger-marks of time. It is a sacred sepulcher. It has ever been and will ever be the favorite resort of poet-pilgrims. It is beautiful to think of Spencer standing by that tomb and attempting, with almost filial affection and reverence, to re-touch, re-chisel, retrace, recover to the world, those "labours" which two forgetful and ungrateful centuries had left to fade away. It is touching to hear his noble lament-" the meed of a noble mind"-when he finds that many a line is already illegible.

"And now their acts be no where to be found

As that renowmèd Poet them compyled,
With warlike numbers and heroicke sound,
Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled,
On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.

Goeffery Chaucer closed a long life with the close of the fourteenth century. His were times when the scholars of the Queenly Isle transmitted their contributions to literature through the Latin, which Bacon, as late as he lived, called the "universal language; times when the English, which is now capable of a polish as perfect as the Parian, was but rough-hewn and freshly quarried. His poems are the infant lispings of that language which has now a larger literature than any other; and which, by a modern British essayist, has been prophesied to be "the language of the Millennium." Yet had Chaucer no other claim to attention and study than that of priority, it is doubtful whether more of him than his name would now be known.

Still, even if precedence were awarded him only in consideration of dates; were the title-the "Father of English poetry"— -conferred upon him only on the ground that he was the pioneer poet of our tongue, yet no one, even then, could call in question his right either to the place or the title. It is of no small moment that it was in the golden age of our English that the laurel was awarded, and his position acknowledged. And there has since risen no Aeschines to question his right to the Crown ;-no literary Iconoclast to hurl him from the pedestal on which the ages have placed him. And it is worthy of the world's remembrance and gratitude that Geoffery Chaucer, the accomplished scholar, to whom the Latin, the French and the English were equally familiar, dared, against the practice then prevalent, to challenge Fame in his own native English rather than in the stalwart Latin or the facile French; thus planting a national literature earlier by a century than otherwise it might have been. This fact, alone, should defend him from the paltry imputation that he introduced French idioms into the English. That he anglicized French words is a fact, but not a fault; or if a fault, he is not answerable for it.

The French was introduced, the historian tells us, as the language of the court, just before William's invasion, by Edward the Confessor, who "natus in Anglia, sed nutritus in Normannia, pene in Gallicum transierat-had become almost a Frenchman." And the Norman conquest not only confirmed the custom at court but extended it to all the nobility and clergy, whence it soon spread to the people. The French now, the whole French, and nothing but the French was talked, written and read.

But the language of France, though it inundated England, was