'This is a mery mornyng,' said litell John,
'Be Hym that dyed on tre;
A more mery man than I am one
Lyves not in Cristiante.

'Pluk up thi hert, my dere mayster,'
Litull John can sey,
'And thynk hit is a full fayre tyme
In a mornyng of May.'

There is no doubting which way _that_ flows! And this vivacity, this new
beat of the heart of poetry, is common to Chaucer and the humblest
ballad-maker; it pulses through any book of lyrics printed yesterday, and
it came straight to us out of Provence, the Roman Province. It was the
Provencal Troubadour who, like the Prince in the fairy tale, broke
through the hedge of briers and kissed Beauty awake again.

You will urge that he wakened Poetry not in England alone but all over
Europe, in Dante before our Chaucer, in the trouveres and minnesingers as
well as in our ballad-writers. To that I might easily retort, 'So much
the better for Europe, and the more of it the merrier, to win their way
into the great comity.' But here I put in my second assertion, that we
English have had above all nations lying wide of the Mediterranean, the
instinct to refresh and renew ourselves at Mediterranean wells; that
again and again our writers--our poets especially--have sought them as
the hart panteth after the water-brooks. If you accept this assertion,
and if you believe as well that our literature, surpassing Rome's, may
vie with that of Athens--if you believe that a literature which includes
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley--the Authorised
Version of Holy Writ, with Browne, Bunyan, Swift, Addison, Johnson,
Arnold, Newman--has entered the circle to take its seat with the first--
why then, heartily believing this with you, I leave you to find some
better explanation than mine if you can.

But what I content myself with asserting here you can scarcely deny.
Chaucer's initial and enormous debt to Dante and Boccaccio stands in as
little dispute as Dunbar's to Chaucer. On that favourite poet of mine,
Sir Thomas Wyat, I descanted in a former lecture. He is one of your
glories here, having entered St. John's College at the age of twelve
(which must have been precocious even for those days.) Anthony Wood
asserts that after finishing his course here, he proceeded to Cardinal
Wolsey's new College at Oxford; but, as Christchurch was not founded
until 1524, and Wyat, still precocious, had married a wife two years
before that, the statem