GEOFFREY CHAUCER. From a Limning in lccleves De Regimine Principis, preserved in the Harleian Library. Londen, March 11820. Published by W Walker & orays bin Square 4 No. 1. CHAUCER. From a Limning in Occleve's De Regimine Principis, preserved in the Harleian Library. "Call up him who left half-told OUR collection opens with the head of the venerable CHAUCER. He has been called the patriarch of our poetry; yet he left no posterity behind him. Two blank and barren centuries succeeded the death of Chaucer; as though the luxuriance of his genius had exhausted the fertility of the land in which it grew, and nature required a long repose before she gave to light a second stately birth. Chaucer was a prodigy, considering the age in which he lived. He was beyond doubt the greatest spirit that preceded Shakespeare. If not so high and universal as that poet" of all time," he was nevertheless almost equally a phenomenon: for he arose in the darkness of learning, when wit was unknown, and poetry itself but a name. He came singly and unsupported: no one preceded him; no one followed him. He cut his way through the air like a meteor, and perished a solitary wonder. The head now offered to the public is a likeness of the poet in his age. It has nothing of his wit or humour, nothing of the flash of genius which would probably have illuminated the features of his youth; but his sweet and sedate expression, his grave good sense, his deep observation and pathos, have been well caught by the artist, and present altogether a graceful and serious combination of character. Chaucer was rather a portrait painter than an imaginative artist. He was more like Titian than Michael-Angelo, Raffaëlle, or Rembrandt; and accordingly, in the place of the fantastic attitude or the soaring eye, we have a staid and gentle aspect, a steady glance, and that particular expression about the mouth which almost invariably denotes an observing man. |