tion of things, that poetry, this
high criticism of life, has truth of substance; and Chaucer's poetry
has truth of substance.

Of his style and manner, if we think first of the romance-poetry and
then of Chaucer's divine liquidness of diction, his divine fluidity of
movement, it is difficult to speak temperately. They are irresistible,
and justify all the rapture with which his successors speak of his
'gold dew-drops of speech.' Johnson misses the point entirely when he
finds fault with Dryden for ascribing to Chaucer the first refinement
of our numbers, and says that Gower also can show smooth numbers and
easy rhymes. The refinement of our numbers means something far more
than this. A nation may have versifiers with smooth numbers and easy
rhymes, and yet may have no real poetry at all. Chaucer is the father
of our splendid English poetry; he is our 'well of English undefiled,'
because by the lovely charm of his diction, the lovely charm of his
movement, he makes an epoch and founds a tradition. In Spenser,
Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, we can follow the tradition of the liquid
diction, the fluid movement of Chaucer; at one time it is his liquid
diction of which in these poets we feel the virtue, and at another time
it is his fluid movement. And the virtue is irresistible.

Bounded as is my space, I must yet find room for an example of
Chaucer's virtue, as I have given examples to show the virtue of the
great classics. I feel disposed to say that a single line is enough to
show the charm of Chaucer's verse; that merely one line like this--

'O martyr souded[9] in virginitee!'

has a virtue of manner and movement such as we shall not find in all
the verse of romance-poetry;--but this is saying nothing. The virtue
is such as we shall not find, perhaps, in all English poetry, outside
the poets whom I have named as the special inheritors of Chaucer's
tradition. A single line, however, is too little if we have not the
strain of Chaucer's verse well in our memory; let us take a stanza. It
is from _The Prioress's Tale_, the story of the Christian child
murdered in a Jewry--

'My throte is cut unto my nekke-bone
Saide this child, and as by way of kinde
I should have deyd, yea, longe time agone;
But Jesu Christ, as ye in bookes finde,
Will that his glory last and be in minde,
And for the worship of his mother dere
Yet may I sing O _Alma_ loud and clere.'

Wordsworth has modernised this Tale, a