EPICURUS. It is not well you should. The cypress, the cyclamen, the violet, will outlast it. Pure tender love wrote it where none shall find it. I often bring her image before me; gentle, serene, impassive. Menander! my Menander! Life has much to give us, and Death has little to take away! therefor the one is to be cherisht, the other neither to be deplored nor feared. While we retain our memory, we also retain, if we are wise and virtuous, the best of our affections; when we lose it, we lose together with it the worst of our calamities. Sleep, every night, deprives men of that faculty which it is (inconsiderately!) thought an evil to lose in the last days of life. MENANDer. Frankly do I confess to you, Epicurus, that I would rather lose my memory than my teeth. One of these losses carries its own remedy with it: we know not, or know but imperfectly, that it is gone: of the other loss we are reminded at least twice a day, and we curse the impotence of cookery. At present I am spared my maledictions: I carry my arms stoutly in high polish, especially when I celebrate the intermarriages of young kid with old chian. There are among us some who, on their return from Persia and Babylonia, have introduced loud music into dinnerparties. Can you imagine anything more barbarous? A festival ought to be a solemnity, and a dinner-party is a festival. During the meal there ought to be silence; after it music as much as you please: it dilutes the grossness of conversation, and corrects its insipidity. Added to which, there is somewhat in music which breathes an aroma over the wine. EPICURUS. Of this you can judge better than I can, who drink water only; and I would rather see kid upon the mountain than upon the table. Yet I also have my delicacies: I am much addicted to sweet and light cakes flavored with rose-water, and to whatever is composed of fruit and cream, not excluding from my hospitable board any quail or patrich that may alight upon it. I do not perceive, my Menander, that the advance of age has produced any material difference in our tempers and dispositions. MENANDER. O my friend, you have always been readier to scrutinize your own heart than your neighbour's. Perhaps I never exhibited in your presence the imperfections of mine; indeed in your company I never was inclined to be impetuous or impatient. Bad men grow worse by keeping, as bad wines do. The unwise are rendered more morose by years, the wise more temperate and gentle. You, who are the essence of tranquility, are unchanged for the worse or the better, while other philosophers indulge their pride, their arrogance, their resentments, toward those nearest them, reserving all their good qualities for the Gods. Tranquility is enjoyment, and it is folly to look for it elsewhere. The passions drive it from the house; it is hazarded in society; it is lost in crowds. Philosophy will always bring it to us, if she knows where to find us, and we will wait for her but we must not behave like children who fight for the ball. She avoids contention, and never scolds or wrangles, never puzzles with a maze of thorny interrogations, in which Truth is farther out of sight at every turn, and the artificer of the clipt hedge shows us no way out of the labyrinth. MENANDER. You are among the few, or I should rather have said you stand the foremost and most distinct, of those who walk quietly with her and converse unostentatiously. It is not pride which withholds you from turning round upon the captious and casting them at your feet. I never answer an adversary. EPICURUS. MENANDer. You confer enough of honour by hearing him. EPICURUS. Even this honour I have no right to claim. MENANDER. But there are extravagancies which you might correct without exciting your bile (if you have any in you) by the least of intercourse. EPICURUS. I suspect, my good Menander, that you enjoy the follies of men in our rotten state as flies enjoy fruit in its decay. MENANDER. What can we do with such men as those about us better than laugh at them? EPICURUS. Nothing with them, but much by keeping apart. If they laugh at each other for their weaknesses and their vices, these, countenanced and cherisht by pleasantry, will become habitual and will increase. MENANDER. If I exhorted them to be virtuous, they would ask me what virtue is. My father would have answered that patriotism is a main part of it; and for such an assertion no Demosthenes could have saved him from the sword of the executioner. One wise man took the poison presented to him by the cup-bearer of the State; another saved the State that ceremonial. Things are not so bad but we are stil permitted to laugh; if we wept, we should be called to a strict account for every tear. EPICURUS. It would be folly to shed one. There are virtuous men among us who feel sorely the ignominy of living under the domination of the stronger. Inconsiderate! Is this, which is now unavoidable, so low a condition as it is to be defrauded of freedom by those in whom we trusted, and to be unable or unwilling to make them responsible for their misdeeds? MENANDER. No slave is clever enough to tie his own hands behind him: only they who call themselves free have acquired this accomplishment. EPICURUS. I live unmolested in my retirement. My philosophy does not irritate or excite. I know what I want of it for home-consumption, and am willing, but not anxious, that others should take the rest. MENANDer. This indeed is true philosophy, yours exclusively. Socrates had a barking stomach for controversy and quibble; Xenophon was half traitor, Plato complete sycophant. Perverseness actuated one, vanity the other: one took Philosophy with him into the camp; the other left her a prostitute in the palace. Far away from both, the graver and better Aristoteles was induced to be the guide of a wild youth, but unwilling and unable to be the keeper of a madman; the Gods have given to Epicurus more than Epicurus could find among the Gods. EPICURUS. Smile, my friend, as you will about them, they have given him a calm conscience, a spirit averse to disputation, and a friend to enjoy his garden with him uninterrupted; a friend even dearer than solitude. POETICAL WORKS OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER.* IT is not creditable to English scholarship that no critical edition of Chaucer's entire works has hitherto been attempted. By his careful recension of the text of The Canterbury Tales, Mr. Thomas Wright has in some measure diminished this reproach, and deserved even better of his own generation than Tyrwhitt of the preceding age. But the most popular of the poet's writings is a portion only of his contributions to English literature; and although from its superior merit and more general interest it will always remain the most attractive, yet it does not illustrate so well as some of his earlier productions, his position as the father of our poetry, and in some degree of our drama also. The stages through which Chaucer passed before he developed the most fertile vein of his genius, are not less instructive than the dramatic essays which paved the way for Shakspeare, or than Shakspeare's own 'prentice-work in his poems, and the plays which he is reasonably supposed to have amended and adapted to the increasing demands of the theatre. Chaucer's Troilus and Creseide, and The Court of Love; The Assembly of Fowls, and The Dream, are as indispensable as his Pilgrimage to the full understanding of the poet himself and his age; and deserve, as they ought long since to have met with, editors as zealous for his text, as Latin and Greek philologers have proved themselves for the frågments of Ennius, Pacuvius, and Menander. It is shrewdly observed by the author of the introduction to Chaucer Modernized, that if Chaucer's poems had been written in Greek or Hebrew, they would have been a thousand times better known. They would have been translated.' The well-known paraphrases of some of his tales by Dryden and Pope, so far from being translations, have on the whole misled readers unacquainted with the original poems as to the character of Chaucer's works. They have disguised his grace, tenderness, and power, no less than Dryden disguised the majestic flow of Virgil, or Pope the masculine simplicity of Homer, in their respective versions of the Mantuan and Ionian bard. The only successful attempt, indeed, to translate Chaucer, is that made some years ago by the accomplished authors of Chaucer Modernized; but even these loyal and scrupulous interpreters have been unable to convey the racy freshness and pictorial grace of the original. In regretting that no complete critical edition of Chaucer has yet appeared, we are fully aware of the difficulty of the task. The literary history of the fourteenth century is extremely obscure. It is impossible to determine the dates of Chaucer's poems generally, and consequently one principal adjunct to the critical recension of them-the successive phases of the author's language-is altogether wanting. Of many of the poems no manuscript has at present been discovered; of others only a single manuscript is known to exist. In the one case, therefore, we are thrown back upon the corrupt editions of Speght and Urry; in the other, upon the care and skill of a single transcriber. And thus, although only four centuries and a half divide us from Chaucer, while more than two thousand years separate us from the received text of Homer and Eschylus, we are better able to determine the actual diction of the Iliad and the Seven against Thebes, than to print the Romaunt of the Rose, or the House of Fame, as Chaucer wrote them down. No intermediate grammarians, as in the case of the Greek poets, have successively laboured on their text; and we may add that, with one or two single exceptions, no English grammarians have been competent or zealous enough for the office of revision. The satirists, both of the last and the present century, have noticed the general indifference of the English people to whatsoever is of home-growth, in literature or in art. It is but re Edited by Robert Bell. 8 vols. *Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. fcap. octavo. J. W. Parker and Son. London, 1854-5. cently that our cathedrals and minsters have been regarded as monuments of high thought and surpassing skill not less deserving of admiration than the Parthenon or the Pantheon. It is but lately that artists have devoted themselves to delineations of English scenery, or forborne transferring from some imaginary Arcadia the streams and woods that beautify their native land. A few years ago, the definition of a scholar was a man steeped to the lips in Horace or Euripides; a philologer profoundly versed in the Teutonic languages was regarded as an inferior being, with a perverse taste for barbarisms. We have indeed slowly recognised the claims of medieval art and literature to at least equal rank with those of Greece and Rome; yet, properly speaking, English philology is still at a discount: it is feebly encouraged and thriftily rewarded at either of our universities, and the general reader will more readily welcome a French or German novelty, than the Faery Queen, the Arcadia, or the Canterbury Tales. Even the superior popularity of Shakspeare is in great measure owing to his possession of the stage. Thousands who believe themselves familiar with Hamlet and Richard III., are indifferent to, or even unacquainted with, Troilus and Cressida, or Timon of Athens. We are a people impatient, as regards literature, of our insular position; and often ungenerous to Taylor and Barrow, while we lavish our applause upon De Lammenais and Lacor daire. As regards Chaucer, indeed, there is some excuse for the comparative neglect of his writings by his countrymen. In spite of all that has been written about the harmony of his verse, and his portraiture of life, manners, and nature, his language is beset with no ordinary difficulties. As a language, indeed, it is almost anomalous. It is not a foreign tongue, neither is it our own. The archaisms of Spenser are obvious: they were designed by the poet as a befitting costume for the dream-like remoteness of his faëry land. The difficulties in Shakspeare proceed from the subtle or all-comprehensive character of his conceptions; we cease to follow him easily, because the orbit of his imagination is so vast, not because his language is purposely or accidentally dark or doubtful. But neither his archaisms nor the sphere and compass of his thought constitute the actual difficulty of Chaucer. The conditions of the language at the time he employed, enlarged, and modified it, alone afford the clue to his comparative obscurity. There is no little inconsistency in the terms ordinarily applied to the writings and the genius of Chaucer. He is described, and properly too, as pouring forth perennial streams of imagery, limpid and fresh as on the day of their first emanation from his mind; and with no less accuracy he is denominated the Father of English Poetry. He is invested with the attributes of hoar antiquity, and at the same time alleged as an instance of the perpetual youth of genius. His everlasting youth and his remote age have, in our opinion, been equally exaggerated. Youthful he doubtless is in his descriptions of human character and external nature. At this hour,' says Mr. De Quincy, 'five hundred years since their creation, the tales of Chaucer, never equalled on this earth for tenderness and for life of picturesqueness, are read familiarly by many in the charming language of their natal day.' Out of nature and out of Shakspeare, are there any mornings like unto Chaucer's mornings any descriptions of the song of birds, of the umbrage of forests or the verdure of lawns, like unto his? Has any other poet, Shakspeare alone excepted, added so largely as Chaucer to the number of our familiar friends? We are as well acquainted with his company of pilgrims as with Romeo and Hamlet, with Imogen and Desdemona, or even with personages centuries younger, Dr. Primrose, Parson Adams, Sophia Western, and Amelia. But the youthfulness of Chaucer's pictures must, with a few exceptional passages, be limited to his Canterbury Tales. In his earlier poems we find ourselves in close contact with conceptions unfamiliar, and with forms that have passed away. It 1856.] Chaucer in relation to English Literature. requires but little stretch of the imagination to join the file of his pilgrims, but in his Troilus and Creseide and his Assembly of Fowls we are transported to the days of pageants and tournaments, to the allegories of Provençal song, to the solemn and elaborate banquets and ceremonies of the middle ages, to the pomp of feudalism and the symbolisms of the Church. The relation in which Chaucer stands to English literature, as its founder and ancestor, has also been overstated. He is undoubtedly by right indefeasible stationed at the root of the stem which has since burgeoned into so many goodly branches, but the pedigree is not without its flaws and breaches. We do not assent to Dr. Nott's theory, that Surrey and Wyatt have a better claim than Chaucer to be regarded as the parents of Elizabethan literature; their lyres were too feebly strung to give the preludial notes to such a choir. Yet it would be hard to show that in any other sense, or to any further extent than that of a consummate painter from life and nature, Chaucer directly influenced the dramatic or descriptive poets of Elizabeth's reign. His imitators indeed survived for more than a century after his death; but neither Lydgate nor Hawes had force or popularity enough to transmit the characteristics of the elder school to the generations below them. How alien indeed the style and spirit of Chaucer were to the sixteenth century, may be seen in Spenser's unfortunate attempt to complete in his Faëry Queene the unfinished story of Cambuscan. The political movements of England indeed effected a nearly total separation between the age of Edward III. and the Tudor era. Warton, with great felicity, compares the appearance of Chaucer in our language to a premature day in an English spring. A brilliant sun enlivens the face of nature with an unusual lustre; the sudden appearance of cloudless skies, and the unexpected warmth of a tepid atmosphere, after the gloom and inclemencies of a tedious winter, fill our hearts with the visionary prospect of a speedy summer; and we finally anticipate a long continuance of gentle gales and 463 vernal serenity. But winter returns with redoubled horrors, and those tender buds and early blossoms which were called forth by the transient gleam of a temporary sunshine, are nipped by frosts and torn by tempests. These metaphors are apt, even when applied to sober history. Chaucer beheld and outlived the eventful and brilliant reign of Edward III. He witnessed the follies and calamities of Edward's grandson, thrust from his pride of place by 'mounting Bolingbroke.' In the accession of the House of Lancaster he saw the germ of those civil wars which extinguished the feudal aristocracy of England, and changed the social aspect of the kingdom from the Tweed to Land's End. towers above his own age in virtue of his genius; but he was not surrounded, as Shakspeare was, by polished shafts becoming the temple in which he sat enthroned. Chaucer was the limitary column of his own generation. He Of this solitude, the condition of the English language in the reign. of Edward III. was in some measure the cause. In the first place, the area of written English was very limited. It was not under stood in the. Celtic districts of yet further circumscribed by the |