beneath the spreading elm, and metaphysical goldfinches and nightingales, perched among the branches green, wrangle melodiously about the tender passion.  In these poems he is fresh, charming, fanciful as the spring-time itself:  ever picturesque, ever musical, and with a homely touch and stroke of irony here and there, suggesting a depth of serious matter in him which it needed years only to develop.  He lived in a brilliant and stirring time; he was connected with the court; he served in armies; he visited the Continent; and, although a silent man, he carried with him, wherever he went, and into whatever company he was thrown, the most observant eyes perhaps that ever looked curiously out upon the world.  There was nothing too mean or too trivial for his regard.  After parting with a man, one fancies that he knew every line and wrinkle of his face, had marked the travel-stains on his boots, and had counted the slashes of his doublet.  And so it was that, after mixing in kings’ courts, and sitting with friars in taverns, and talking with people on country roads, and travelling in France and Italy, and making himself master of the literature, science, and theology of his time, and when perhaps touched with misfortune and sorrow, he came to see the depth of interest that resides in actual life,—­that the rudest clown even, with his sordid humours and coarse speech, is intrinsically more valuable than a whole forest full of goddesses, or innumerable processions of cardinal virtues, however well mounted and splendidly attired.  It was in some such mood of mind that Chaucer penned those unparalleled pictures of contemporary life that delight yet, after five centuries have come and gone.  It is difficult to define Chaucer’s charm.  He does not indulge in fine sentiment; he has no bravura passages; he is ever master of himself and of his subject.  The light upon his page is the light of common day.  Although powerful delineations of passion may be found in his “Tales,” and wonderful descriptions of nature, and although certain of the passages relating to Constance and Griselda in their deep distresses are unrivalled in tenderness, neither passion, nor natural description, nor pathos, are his striking characteristics.  It is his shrewdness, his conciseness, his ever-present humour, his frequent irony, and his short, homely line—­effective as the play of the short Roman sword—­which strikes the reader most.  In the “Prologue to the Canterbury Tales”—­by far the ripest thing he has done—­he seems to be writing the easiest, most idiomatic prose, but it is poetry all the while.  He is a poet of natural manner, dealing with out-door life.  Perhaps, on the whole, the writer who most resembles him—­superficial differences apart—­is Fielding.  In both there is constant shrewdness and common-sense, a constant feeling of the comic side of things, a moral instinct which escapes in irony, never in denunciation or fanaticism; no remarkable spirituality of feeling,