a doom of eternal cold, is not so absurd in the twentieth century as amid the certainties of two hundred years ago. We are taught to expect that catastrophe by popular science, the mythology of our day. But our day is also the day of the Romantic Revival, and in it we imitate, unconsciously, the attitude adopted towards the strange by our forefathers in the first Romantic epoch. We turn, as they did, to all mankind's imaginings, not for comfort, but for human fellowship, in the great Romance of Man's adventure through the Universe. We take our part in that quest, with a brave astonishment. In Romantic literature we listen to the camp-songs of our comrades, and 'Greet the unseen with a cheer.' THE POETRY OF THE PRISON THERE is a great gulf fixed between 1450 and 1550, the last watch of the Middle Age and the full flush of the Renaissance. You pass it insensibly, by the way of the years; but to look backward after those same years is to see, as beyond a bridge that has crumbled, the old social life completely severed from the new, with its conditions all changed for all classes. And nowhere is this contrast more deeply marked than in the lives of poets; for the change from desultory invasion to world-wide diplomacy commuted the conditions under which in France all, and in England many of, the writers we care to recall, were moved to produce, or did produce, their work. During the Hundred Years' War every man of standing in both countries had to play his part. Of the English in the great expedition under Edward III. there was not knight, squire, or man of honour, from the age of twenty to sixty years that did not go'; 1 and the burden upon France was aggravated by civil war between the feudatories of the Crown. And thus it came about that Geoffrey Chaucer, entering the customary career of an English gentleman, suffered its common accidents. He joined Edward's expedition in November, 1359, and was taken in a skirmish near Rheims.2 In The Knight's Tale, therefore, we have the poetry, echoed 1 Johnes' Froissart, bk. 1. c. 206. See Rev. W. W. Skeat's Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. i. p. xviii. 2 Ibid. |