ious
pilgrims who resented Bishop Sudbury's manly truthfulness, swelled the
mob which eleven years later butchered "the plunderer" as it called
him, "of the Commons." It is such glimpses as this which show us how
important the Church had become towards the people. Worse was to ensue
before the better came; in the meantime, the nation was in that stage
of its existence when the innocence of the child was fast losing
itself, without the self-control of the man having yet taken its place.

But the heart of England was sound the while. The national spirit of
enterprise was not dead in any class, from knight to shipman; and
faithfulness and chastity in woman were still esteemed the highest
though not the universal virtues of her sex. The value of such
evidence as the mind of a great poet speaking in his works furnishes
for a knowledge of the times to which he belongs is inestimable. For
it shows us what has survived, as well as what was doomed to decay, in
the life of the nation with which that mind was in sensitive sympathy.
And it therefore seemed not inappropriate to approach, in the first
instance, from this point of view the subject of this biographical
essay,--Chaucer, "the poet of the dawn." For in him there are many
things significant of the age of transition in which he lived; in him
the mixture of Frenchman and Englishman is still in a sense incomplete,
as that of their language is in the diction of his poems. His gaiety
of heart is hardly English; nor is his willing (though, to be sure, not
invariably unquestioning) acceptance of forms into the inner meaning of
which he does not greatly vex his soul by entering; nor his airy way of
ridiculing what he has no intention of helping to overthrow; nor his
light unconcern in the question whether he is, or is not, an immoral
writer. Or, at least, in all of these things he has no share in
qualities and tendencies, which influences and conflicts unknown to and
unforeseen by him may be safely said to have ultimately made
characteristic of Englishmen. But he IS English in his freedom and
frankness of spirit; in his manliness of mind; in his preference for
the good in things as they are to the good in things as they might be;
in his loyalty, his piety, his truthfulness. Of the great movement
which was to mould the national character for at least a long series of
generations he displays no serious foreknowledge; and of the elements
already preparing to affect the cours