"Chaucer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... may challenge us English boldly! For since Chaucer, at any rate, he and his train have never been [Greek: akletoi] to us—least ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, wrote a poem, partly fiction and partly allegorical, called the Battle of Don Carnival, which strongly resembles Chaucer; both poets found their material ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... even these began to suffer. Curiously enough, Geoffrey Baker in his Chronicle (which, written in his own hand, after six hundred years yet remains in the Bodleian at Oxford) tells us that none fell till they were afraid of it. Still more curiously, Chaucer, Langland, and Wycliff, who all witnessed it, hardly mention it at all. There could not be any more eloquent tribute to the nameless horror that it caused than this hushed silence on the part of three ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... Charlemont, Lady, Lord Byron's admiration of ——, Mrs. Charles the Fifth Charlotte, the Princess, attacks upon Lord Byron in consequence of his verses to Death of Chatham, Lord, a notice of His oratory Chatterton, Thomas, self-educated Never vulgar Chaucer, Geoffrey, character of his poetry Chauncy, Captain Chaworth, Mary Anne (afterwards Mrs. Musters), Lord Byron's early attachment to His last farewell of her Her marriage Interview with, after her marriage Cheltenham, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... it not necessary to offer any apology for my going all the way back to Chaucer, and noting the Ebb and Flow in English Poetry down to the present time, of the spirituality which constitutes the real life of poetry, and which should, as far as possible, be brought to the consciousness and appreciation of students. What I mean ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... in correspondence with some transition, in the nature of the imagery or passion." This is not to be taken quite literally. The accentual principle was assuredly nothing new in English verse, and syllable-counting, though introduced by Chaucer, had to be reintroduced by the Renaissance poets and did not become an unquestioned convention till the latter part of the seventeenth century. But the return to free accentual verse in the "Christabel" was an innovation at the beginning of the nineteenth ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... origins of words, and makes no attempt to enforce a moral. My aim has been to select especially the unexpected in etymology, "things not generally known," such as the fact that Tammany was an Indian chief, that assegai occurs in Chaucer, that jilt is identical with Juliet, that brazil wood is not named from Brazil, that to curry favour means to comb down a horse of a particular colour, and so forth. The treatment is made as simple as possible, ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... distinctive political or literary character. The white cliffs of Albion covered the soil of our nativity, though another hemisphere first opened our eyes on the light of day, and oceans rolled between us and them. We were Britons born, and we claimed to be the countrymen of Chaucer and Shakspeare, Milton and Newton, Sidney and Locke, Arthur and Alfred, as well as of Edward the Black Prince, Harry of Monmouth, and Elizabeth. But when our fathers abjured the name of Britons, and 'assumed among the nations of the earth the separate and ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... these lines than any amount of Aurora Leighs, Festuses, or such like, with all their mighty "somethingness," as Mr. Bailey would say. For they, are they not the "native wood-notes wild" of one of nature's darlings? Here is the indescribable, inestimable, unmistakable impress of genius. Chaucer, had he been a Galloway man, might have written it, only he would have been more garrulous, and less compact and stern. It is like Tam o' Shanter, in its living union of the comic, the pathetic, and the terrible. Shrewdness, tenderness, imagination, fancy, humor, word-music, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... almost historical. It is still remembered as "the Queen's Plantagenet Ball." It was a very artistic and wonderfully perfect revival, for one night at Buckingham Palace, of the age of Chaucer and the Court of Edward ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... centuries have carried these books along with them—the solace and the strength of myriad millions of our kind. Forms, now turning into dust, holy in our memories, read these familiar pages. Men whose names carry us back through English history knew and prized these writings; Cromwell, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Great Alfred. When Rome was the seat of empire, Constantine heard them in his churches. Aurelius informed himself about them. In the lowly hamlet hidden away among the hills of Galilee, the boy Jesus listened to these tales of Hebrew heroism and holiness from ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... field for a long time, even against the new algorism employing the new numerals. {121} Geoffrey Chaucer[477] describes in The Miller's ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... fortune's sharp adversitie The worst kind of infortune is this: A man that hath been in prosperitie, And it remember when it passed is. — Chaucer. ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... the most catching nature. Having arrived at Hazlitt or Leigh Hunt, you can branch off once more at any one of ten thousand points into still wider circles. And thus you may continue up and down the centuries as far as you like, yea, even to Chaucer. If you chance to read Hazlitt on *Chaucer and Spenser*, you will probably put your hat on instantly and go out and buy these authors; such is his communicating fire! I need not particularise further. Commencing with Lamb, and allowing one thing to lead to another, you cannot fail to ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... first English layman whom we know to have been a great power in literature; less as a "maker," poet or proseman, than as an opener out to "makers" of precious store; a helper and encourager; a fellow-student; a learner and a teacher of whom it could be said, as Chaucer says of his Clerk of Oxford, "gladly would he learn and ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... Geoffrey Chaucer, born about 1340, was the first great English poet. The immense popularity of the Canterbury Tales is shown by the number of manuscript copies still in existence. It was one of the first books printed ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... began to perceive that many forms of art might be equally legitimate under different conditions, his first proceeding was to classify them in different schools. English poets, for example, were arranged by Pope and Gray as followers of Chaucer, Spenser, Donne, Dryden, and so forth; and, in later days, we have such literary genera as are indicated by the names classic and romantic or realist and idealist, covering characteristic tendencies of the various historical groups. The fact that literary productions ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... quaintness, and of every species of puerility, very rare among the didactic writers of the age,—the critic proceeds to an enumeration of our principal vernacular poets, or "vulgar makers," as he is pleased to anglicize the words. Beginning with a just tribute to Chaucer, as the father of genuine English verse, he passes rapidly to the latter end of the reign of Henry VIII., when, as he observes, there "sprung up a new company of courtly makers, of whom sir Thomas Wyat the elder and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... and with the loud pedal—to ask this man to smile even faintly at Thoreau's humor is like casting a pearl before a coal baron. Emerson implies that there is one thing a genius must have to be a genius and that is "mother wit." ... "Doctor Johnson, Milton, Chaucer, and Burns had it. Aunt Mary Moody Emerson has it and can write scrap letters. Who has it need never write anything but scraps. Henry Thoreau has it." His humor though a part of this wit is not always as spontaneous, for it is sometimes pun shape (so is Charles Lamb's)—but it is nevertheless ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... you're apt to meet him on these excursions. Of course, he writes about books, and very tastefully and modestly; there's hardly any of the brand-new immortal English poets, who die off so rapidly, but has had a good word from him; but his heart is with the older fellows, from Chaucer down; and, after the Charles Lamb epoch, I don't know whether he loves better the Elizabethan age or that of Queen Anne. Think of him making me stop the other day at a bookstall, and read through an essay out of the "Spectator!" ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... he said sulkily. "I have only seen her in the 'row' and that once, she was ahead of me so I did not see her face, but she sat her horse well and her figure is perfect. I overheard Wingfield at the 'Russell' club rooms, telling Chaucer of the Guards (who is wild to meet her) that there is nothing to compare with her in the kingdom, that she is a perfect goddess. ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... poems attributed to Rowley cannot be decided by any person who has not a taste for English poetry, and a moderate, at least, if not a critical, knowledge of the compositions of most of our poets from the time of Chaucer to that of Pope. Such a one alone is, in my opinion, acompetent judge of this matter; and were a jury of twelve such persons empaneled to try the question, Ihave not the smallest doubt what would be their almost instantaneous decision. Without this ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... Westminster Abbey, the 3d of August following, near the ashes of Chaucer and Spenser. King Charles II. was pleased to bestow upon him the best character, when, upon the news of his death, his Majesty declared, that Mr. Cowley had not left a better man behind him in England. A monument ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... this horse-play was to the Puritans, aggravated by the fact that it was done to note a holy day. On Shrove Tuesday, in 1685, there was "great disorder in town by reason of Cock-skailing." This was the barbarous game of cock-steling, or cock-throwing, or cock-squoiling—a game as old as Chaucer's time, a universal pastime on Shrove Tuesday in England, where scholars also had cock-fights ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... of the lovers has no known direct source. The Diana Enamorada has a love potion with an effect similar to that of Oberon's. The wedding of Theseus and the Amazon queen is the opening theme of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, and some minor details may also have been borrowed from that story. No doubt, Shakespeare had also read for details North's {152} account of Theseus in his translation of Plutarch. Pyramus and Thisbe came originally from Ovid's Metamorphoses, which ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... of Van Haren, in praise of peace, upon the conclusion of that made at Aix la Chapelle; but the poem which procured him the greatest reputation, was, that upon the Attributes of the Deity, of which we have already taken notice. He was employed by Mr. Ogle to translate some of Chaucer's Tales into modern English, which he performed with great spirit, and received at the rate of three pence a line for his trouble. Mr. Ogle published a complete edition of that old poet's Canterbury Tales Modernized; and Mr. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... derivation. We can say with certainty that these nine plays were made out of stories from Boccaccio, Masuccio, Bandello, Ser Giovanni, Straparola, Cinthio or Belleforest; that those six were based on older plays, and another half-dozen drawn from Holinshed; that Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Sidney, Greene, and Lodge provided other plots; and so forth, until we are left with The Tempest, founded in part on an actual contemporary event, Love's Labour's Lost, apparently his only original plot—if indeed ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... songster of ideal love." He also gave a great impulse to civilization by his labors in collecting and collating manuscripts. Boccaccio also lent his aid in the revival of literature, and wrote a series of witty, though objectionable stories, from which the English Chaucer borrowed the notion of his "Canterbury Tales." Chaucer is the father of English poetry, and kindled a love of literature among his isolated countrymen; and was one of the few men who, in the evening of his days, looked upon the world without austerity, and expressed ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... will soon rival the Dutch in these baubles. [Clockwork appears to have been introduced into England in the reign of Edward III., when three Dutch horologers were invited over from Delft. They must soon have passed into common use, for Chaucer thus ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... opportunity to new men. A wide commerce, while it had insensibly softened the asperities of Puritanism and imported enough foreign refinement to humanize not enough foreign luxury to corrupt, had not essentially qualified the native tone of the town. Retired sea-captains (true brothers of Chaucer's Shipman), whose exploits had kindled the imagination of Burke, added a not unpleasant savor of salt to society. They belonged to the old school of Gilbert, Hawkins, Frobisher, and Drake, parcel-soldiers all of them, who had commanded armed ships ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... or by young nobles at the court, and much old lyric poetry, and receiving its philosophy and its final shape perhaps from priests of a contemplative school of Buddhism. A small daimio or feudal lord of the ancient capital Nara, a contemporary of Chaucer's, was the author, or perhaps only the stage-manager, of many plays. He brought them to the court of the Shogun at Kioto. From that on the Shogun and his court were as busy with dramatic poetry as the Mikado and his with lyric. ...
— Certain Noble Plays of Japan • Ezra Pound
... habit of wise humanity to speak in enigmas only, so that the highest truths and usefullest laws must be hunted for through whole picture-galleries of dreams, which to the vulgar seem dreams only. Thus Homer, the Greek tragedians, Plato, Dante, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Goethe, have hidden all that is chiefly serviceable in their work, and in all the various literature they absorbed and re-embodied, under types which have rendered it quite useless to the multitude. What is worse, the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... a brief sketch of Tennyson's life, and name his chief works. Why is he, like Chaucer, a national poet? Is your pleasure in reading Tennyson due chiefly to the thought or the melody of expression? Note this figure ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy from what it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said to be the first reformers of our English metre and style." The dull moralizings of the rimers who followed Chaucer, the rough but vivacious doggrel of Skelton, made way in the hands of Wyatt and Surrey for delicate imitations of the songs, sonnets, and rondels of Italy and France. With the Italian conceits came an Italian refinement whether of words or of thought; and the force and versatility ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... superstitions in medicine persist. In Chaucer's day, the fourteenth century, violent and poisonous drugs were used, but luckily they were often administered to a little dummy which the doctor carried about with him. As we read each day in our newspapers of the various nostrums advertised as curing ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... time has come in the history of a people for it to play a greater part on the world's stage: some danger has threatened the national life and aroused its energies, or other causes have worked to quicken the mental and spiritual life; an Elizabethan era is ushered in, frequently by a forerunner, a Chaucer, and the language responds, its forms develop and are perfected. Or else some fitting or amalgamating force comes in from outside, the life of the people is widened, new blood enters in every sense, and the forms of the language ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us ever with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer,[33] of Marvell,[34] of Dryden,[35] with the most modern joy,—with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of this kind of poetry into his own kind. And the writer of excellent lyrics and romances of this kind will be almost sure to fail in real drama. I wish, in order to avoid confusion of thought, that the term "dramatic" were only used of poetry which belongs to drama itself. I have heard Chaucer called dramatic. It is a complete misnomer. His genius would have for ever been unable to produce a good drama. Had he lived in Elizabeth's time, he would, no doubt, have tried to write one, but he must have failed. The genius for story-telling is just the genius which ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... imaginative painter's work, and break off the merest stem or twig of it, it all goes to pieces like a Prince Rupert's drop. There is not so much as a seed of it but it lies on the tree's life, like the grain upon the tongue of Chaucer's sainted child. Take it away, and the boughs will sing to us no longer. All ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... creations. Take Shakespeare, for example. There was what he found read to his hand in English literature; and what he brought into England out of the Unknown. In his outwardness, the fabric of his art—we can trace this broad river back to a thinnish stream by the name of Chaucer; or he was growth, recognizably, of the national tree of which Chaucer was the root, or lay at the root. The unity called English poetry had grown naturally from that root to this glorious flower: the sparkle, with, brightness, and above all large hold upon ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... with the Hindu tale of a wooden Garuda (the bird of Vishnu) built by a youth for the purpose of a vehicle. It came with the "Moors" to Spain and appears in "Le Cheval de Fust," a French poem of the thirteenth Century. Thence it passed over to England as shown by Chaucer's "Half-told tale of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Son to her all but celestial arms—the Son of God fainting beneath a load of woe, not his own. Old Poetry! Glorious old Homer, with his magic song; and sturdy, oak-like in his strength, as in his verdure, old Chaucer. Old Music! Hail, ye inspired sons of the lyre! A noble host are ye, enshrined in the hearts of all loyal worshippers of the tuneful god. And yet (we grieve to confess it) we, even we, spite of all our enthusiasm, have been ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... the actions and adventures of his life ... they display a marked preference for deeds done, and attempt no character-drawing.... A sense of the instability of human life, very present to the minds of men familiar with battle and plague, is everywhere mirrored in these romances.' Then came Chaucer, who not only wrote prose tales, but also carried far toward perfection the art of narration in verse; and 'in the fifteenth century both of the ancestors of the modern novel—that is, the novella or short pithy story after the manner of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... that I read for the first time the Vision of Death and the Lament for O'Daly. After that I met with many old people who had in the days before the Famine seen or talked with the wandering poet who was in the succession of those who had made and recited their lyrics on the Irish roads before Chaucer wrote. ...
— The Kiltartan Poetry Book • Lady Gregory
... was born to other things. Chaucer was a clerk in the Custom House, and found time to be the father of English poetry. Horace's daily work did not hinder him from becoming a poet. His love of Greek, acquired in Athens and Asia Minor, and the natural bent of his mind made him the greatest imitator and adapter of foreign verses ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... 1315, and Caxton printed it in English in 1483; hence it was adopted by Boccaccio, Day vii., Novella 9; whence Chaucer's "Marchaundes Tale": this, by-the-by, was translated by Pope in his sixteenth or seventeenth year, and christened "January and May." The same story is inserted in La Fontaine (Contes, lib. ii., No. 8), "La Gageure des trois Commeres," with the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... told, came to find more enjoyment in easy living than in ascetic and religious observances. Apart from the savage onslaughts in Piers Plowman, and the yarns of Layton and Legh, now quite discredited, we have the most credible evidence in Chaucer's gentle satire:— ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... Monthly, and from 1863 to 1872 the North American Review. His prose, beginning with an early volume of Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 1844, has consisted mainly of critical essays on individual writers, such as Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Emerson, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Pope, Carlyle, etc., together with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, like Witchcraft, New England Two Centuries Ago, My Garden Acquaintance, A Good Word for Winter, Abraham Lincoln, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... the perpetual sublimation of erotic desire into forms of more sincere purity, of larger harmony, in gaining which ends all the essential ends of morality are alone gained. The delicate adjustment of the needs of each sex to the needs of the other sex to the end of what Chaucer called fine loving, the adjustment of the needs of both sexes to the larger ends of fine living, may well furnish a perpetual moral discipline which extends its fortifying influence ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... that common mind which—as one divines—runs through all, is not, as with us, broken into a dozen minds that know nothing of each other, something even of what is most subtle in these verses will have come, in a few generations, to the beggar on the roads. When there was but one mind in England, Chaucer wrote his Troilus and Cressida, and thought he had written to be read, or to be read out—for our time was coming on apace—he was sung by minstrels for a while. Rabindranath Tagore, like Chaucer's forerunners, writes music for his words, and one understands at every moment that he is so abundant, ...
— Gitanjali • Rabindranath Tagore
... something—hunting or hawking, or rowing boats, or treading grapes, or making shoes, or cooking something in a pot. "Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira voluptas." (I quote from memory.) The Middle Ages is full of that spirit in all its monuments and manuscripts. Chaucer retains it in his jolly insistence on everybody's type of trade and toil. It was the earliest and youngest resurrection of Europe, the time when social order was strengthening, but had not yet become oppressive; the ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... From Chaucer's character of the Temple Manciple, it would appear that the great preferment which advocates in this time chiefly aspired to, was to become steward to ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... of bronze or marble which it is proposed to erect to the memory of Sir Robert Peel in our great towns and cities, surmounted with a hat of marble or of bronze, to see, at a glance, the absurdity of the thing, and the reasonableness of the demand for a change. There is a very good bust of Chaucer, with a cap on, and there is a still more excellent bust of Lorenzo de Medici, which has also a cap; but we put the question to the most conservative of hatters, and to the greatest stickler for the etatus ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... hero, the course of his studies. "To poetry, like most infants, I devoted most of my time." From modern poetry he went back to the earlier sources, first with the idea of systematic reading and at last through Chaucer and Gower and early ballads, until he lost himself "in a dismal swamp of barbarous romances and lying Latin chronicles. I got hold of the Bibliotheca Monastica, containing a copious account of Anglo-Norman authors, with notices of their works, ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... art,' and so forth. One wonders how Lowell read the passage on Iona, and the letter to Lord Chesterfield, and the Preface to the Dictionary without conviction of the great English writer's supreme art—art that declares itself and would not be hidden. But take the essay on Pope, that on Chaucer, and that on one Percival, a writer of American verse of whom English readers are not aware, and they prove Lowell to have been as clear in judging as he was exquisite in sentencing. His essay 'On a Certain Condescension ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... as Chaucer's Prioress, received the company at the top of the sun-dial steps, looking, in the opinion of the Foursome League, quite sufficiently like the ghost of yesterday to have justified squeals had they met her alone. ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... however, is and will for a long time remain Carolyn Wells's The Book of Humorous Verse. This has not an equal in existence, so far as I know, except The Home Book of Verse. Here in nearly 900 pages are specimens of light verse from Chaucer to Chesterton. Modern writers, such as Bert Leston Taylor and Don Marquis, share the pages with Robert Herrick and William Cowper, Charles Lamb and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Verses whimsical, satiric, narrative, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... Trophonius strikes us at once as affording a clue to THE CAVE into which Venus fled, giving great probability to Valens as the true solution of Chaucer's meaning. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... clubs, the object of which is knowledge and the broadening of the intellectual horizon. Science, languages, literature, are their daily food. They can speak in tongues; they can talk about the solar spectrum; they can interpret Chaucer, criticise Shakespeare, understand Browning. There is no literature, ancient or modern, that they do not dig up by the roots and turn over, no history that they do not drag before the club for final judgment. In every little village there is this intellectual stir ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... would be valued as one of the immortal classics. All men of culture have admired it, from Augustine to Bossuet, and acknowledged their obligations to him. We accord to the great poets the formation of languages,—Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakspeare; but I doubt if either Virgil or Horace contributed to the formation of the Latin language more than Cicero. Certainly they have not been more studied and admired. In every succeeding age the Orations of Cicero have been one of the first books which have been used as textbooks in colleges. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... Tale is unfinished in all the manuscripts; but in some, of minor authority, the Cook is made to break off his tale, because "it is so foul," and to tell the story of Gamelyn, on which Shakespeare's "As You Like It" is founded. The story is not Chaucer's, and is different in metre, and inferior in composition to the Tales. It is supposed that Chaucer expunged the Cook's Tale for the same reason that made him on his death- bed lament that he had ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Geffrey Chaucer, in his argument to The Assemblie of Foules, relates that, "All foules are gathered before Nature on St. Valentine's day, to chose their makes. A formell egle beyng beloved of three tercels, requireth a yeeres ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Newton. The little watch tower where he pierced the heavens with his telescope is still standing. One ascends it, and surveys the firmament, not without a reverential feeling. Cambridge abounds with the associations of genius. Chaucer studied here, and at Oxford also, it is said; and in treading the great court of Trinity, one cannot help thinking of Bacon. Milton's mulberry tree is yet standing, and puts forth a few fresh leaves every spring in the garden of Christ's College. His manuscript of 'Comus,' partly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... The spot where the Duke of Somerset and the northern nobility of the Lancastrian faction were executed after the battle is still called Dukesfield. The inhabitants of this country speak an odd dialect of the Saxon, approaching nearly that of Chaucer, and have retained some customs peculiar to themselves. They are the descendants of the ancient Danes, chased into the fastnesses of Northumberland by the severity of William the Conqueror. Their ignorance is surprising to a Scotchman. It is common for the traders in cattle, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... what is more, they are just the same sort of people. If they do not go to Canterbury they go by the Clacton Belle to Clacton-on-Sea. There is not a Sunday the whole summer through but you may find all Chaucer's pilgrims, man and woman for man and woman, on board the Lord of the Isles or the Clacton Belle. Why, I have seen the Wife of Bath on the Lord of the Isles myself. She was eating her luncheon off an Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday, ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... heart still hovering o'er a song begun, And smile that warmed the world with benison, Our father, lord long since of lordly rhyme, Long since hath haply ridden, when the lime Bloomed broad above him, flowering where he came. Because thy passage once made warm this clime, Our father Chaucer, here we praise ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... life around it, as well as to reproduce it.' Having inspired Ovid and Vergil, and been recognized by Lucretius, it passed as a literary legacy to Boethius, Dante, and Jean de Meung; it was incorporated by Frezzi in his strange allegorical composition the Quadriregio, and was thrice handled by Chaucer; it was dealt with humorously by Cervantes in Don Quixote, and became the prey of the satirist in the hands of Juvenal, Bertini, and Hall. The association of this ideal world with the simplicity of pastoral ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... there comes an Englishman nourished on this poetry, taught his trade by this poetry, getting words, rhyme, metre from this poetry; for even of that stanza which the Italians used, and which Chaucer derived immediately from the Italians, the basis and suggestion was probably given in France. Chaucer (I have already named him) fascinated his contemporaries, but so too did Christian of Troyes and Wolfram of Eschenbach. Chaucer's power of fascination, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... old Mandeville cautiously observeth, two centuries preceding the days of Porta, were "by craft or by nygromancye, I wot nere." But that they were not unknown to Chaucer, appears in his "Frankelein's Tale," where, minutely describing them, he communicates the same pleasure he must himself have received from the ocular illusions of "the Tregetoure," or "Jogelour." Chaucer ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... as Hayday himself, and never lets her folios shiver when they ought to be warm. Moreover, she reads her books, and, like the scholar in Chaucer, would rather have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... were not written for children, they may outrage readers offended by Chaucer, La Fontaine, Rabelais and The Old ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... ther was of religion, That was a poure Persone of a toune; But rich he was of holy thought and work, He also was a learned man a clerk.—CHAUCER ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is more a narrative of external incidents than is actually the case. In truth, though the "corporal rind" of the narrative bulks upon our view, the poet remains essentially the psychologist. The narrative interest is not evenly distributed over the whole as it is in the works of such a writer as Chaucer, who loves narrative for its own sake. There is ordinarily a crisis, a culmination, a decisive and eventful invasion or outbreak of spiritual passion to which we are led up by all that precedes it. If the poem should be humorous, it works up to some humorous point, or surprise. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... he, "by those ponds in which, I assure you, old Isaac might have fished with delight, I pass many a summer's day. I was always a lover of the angle, and the farthest pool is the most beautiful bathing-place imaginable;—as glorious Geoffrey Chaucer says,— ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of vellum. In a volume (No. 39) is a copy of the Gospel of Nicodemus in an English version beginning, "Whanne Pylatus was reuler and justyse of ye Jewerye, and Rufus and Leo were consuls." Another book of more than ordinary interest is Chaucer's translation of Boethius' "De Consolatione Philosophiae," on vellum in double columns, fifteenth century. A twelfth century MS. of the "Historia Regum Brittaniae," by Geoffrey de Monmouth (No. 121); and the "Historia Miscella" of Paul Warnefrid, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... am sure of it, Mr. Fox," cried Dorothy; clapping her hands. "Persuade him to stay awhile in London, that you may have him at your next theatricals at Holland House. Why, he knows Shakespeare and Pope and—and Chaucer by heart, and Ovid and Horace,—is it ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... argument on the prevalence of the jew's trump, there is surely one instrument that may be said to be national in the fullest acceptance of the word. The herdboy in the broom, already musical in the days of Father Chaucer, startles (and perhaps pains) the lark with this exiguous pipe; and in the hands of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was styled Leading Cases done into English, by an Apprentice of Lincoln's Inn. It appealed only to a limited public, for it is actually a collection of sixteen important law-cases set forth, with explanatory notes, in excellent verse imitated from poets great and small. Chaucer, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, Clough, Rossetti, and James Rhoades supply the models, and I have been credibly informed that the law is as good as the versification. Mr. Swinburne was in those days the favourite butt of young parodists, and the gem of the book is ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... qualities of poetry, in the presence [8] of which the English is equal or superior to all other modern literature—the native, sublime, and beautiful, but often wild and irregular, imaginative power in English poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare, with which Professor Minto deals, in his Characteristics of English Poets (Blackwood), lately reprinted. That his book should have found many readers we can well understand, in the light of the excellent qualities which, in ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... it, and in much else that he wrote, he finds a congenial escape from the mere middle-class respectability of his time, and ranges himself with the splendid chivalry both of the past and of the present. There is an elfin element in him as there was in Chaucer, which now and again twinkles forth in a quaint touch of humour, or escapes from the merely spiritual into ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... historically, that it is very hazardous to make rules in grammar: what is at present regarded as correct may not be so twenty years from now, even if our rules are founded on the keenest scrutiny of the "standard" writers of our time. Usage is varied as our way of thinking changes. In Chaucer's time two or three negatives were used to strengthen a negation; as, "Ther nas no man nowher so vertuous" (There never was no man nowhere so virtuous). And Shakespeare used good English when he said more elder ("Merchant of Venice") and ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... of small volumes of English verse, extensively annotated by his own hand, which Stoddard had brought to her early in their acquaintance, leaving it with her more as a gift than as a loan. She kept these little books after all the others had gone back. She had read and reread them—cullings from Chaucer, from Spenser, from the Elizabethan lyrists, the border balladry, fierce, tender, oh, so human—till she knew pages of them by heart, and their vocabulary influenced her own, their imagery tinged all her leisure thoughts. It seemed to her, whenever she debated returning ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... in Dryden, but as little, I think, as is possible, considering how much he has written. You will easily understand my meaning, when I refer to his versification of Palamon and Arcite, as contrasted with the language of Chaucer. Dryden had neither a tender heart nor a lofty sense of moral dignity. Whenever his language is poetically impassioned, it is mostly upon unpleasing subjects, such as the follies, vices, and crimes of classes of men or of individuals, That his cannot be the language of imagination, must have ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... world. The first important place visited was Westminster Abbey, an old church, founded in the seventh century, rebuilt in 1049, and restored to its present form in the thirteenth century. Many eminent men and women are buried here. Chaucer, the first poet to find a resting place in the Abbey, was interred in 1400. The place where Major Andre is buried is marked by a small piece of the pavement bearing his name. On the wall close by is a monument to him. Here are the graves of Isaac Newton, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... of Fowls" — which Chaucer's "Retractation" describes as "The Book of Saint Valentine's Day, or of the Parliament of Birds" — we are presented with a picture of the mediaeval "Court of Love" far closer to the reality than we find in Chaucer's poem which bears that express title. We have a regularly constituted conclave ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... step-sister, and Mercy, and I, being all three of a name, and I being alwaies called Meg, we had in sport given one the significative of her characteristic virtue, and the other that of y'e French Marguerite, which may indeed be rendered either pearl or daisy. And Chaucer, speaking of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... illustrating the imaginative faculty; 2, "Piers Ploughman's Vision," as the first characteristically English poem; 3, "The Metrical Romances," marking the advent into our poetry of the sense of Beauty; 4, "The Ballads," especially as models of narrative diction; 5, Chaucer, as the poet of real life—the poet outside of nature; 6, Spenser, as the representative of the purely poetical; 7, Milton, as representing the imaginative; 8, Butler, as the wit; 9, Pope, as the poet of artificial life; 10, "On Poetic ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... afterwards exhibited at that melancholy monument to past exhibitions, the Colosseum in the Regent's Park. He was employed by Charles Knight in the illustrations to his "Shakespeare," "London," "Old England," "Chaucer," and the now forgotten "Penny Magazine," for all of which publications he ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... order: for that is the simplest. And I have begun with—not Chaucer, nor Spenser, nor the ballads, but—Shakespeare and Agincourt; for it seemed to me that a book of heroism could have no better starting-point than that heroic pair of names. As for the ballads, I have placed them, after much considering, ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... Fictions, a book now somewhat obsolete) remarks, "There is nothing said about the bridle in the account of the sale (infra), but I am sure that in the original tale, Badr's misfortunes must have been owing to his having parted with it. In Chaucer's Squier's Tale the bridle would also appear to have been of some importance. "He quotes a story from the Notti Piacevoli of Straparola, the Milanese, published at Venice in 1550. And there is a popular story ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... excepting such men as Newton, Locke, and Boyle; the most celebrated monarchs, from Alfred to Victoria; the most venerable judges, with Sir Matthew Hale as their representative; the sweetest poets, from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, down to Dryden, Young, and Cowper; and the most devoted philanthropists, from Penn, and Howard, and Wesley, to Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale, have been lovers and students of the Bible. The men that ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... maintaining that one of the oldest of the English poets had mentioned it in a poem, and the other as stoutly denying it. At last a reverend gentleman, whose remarks respecting the intelligence of the children of Ham had been particularly disparaging, asserted that nowhere in Chaucer, Spencer, nor any of the old English poets could anything relating to it be found. At this, the little waiter became so excited that he could no longer contain himself, and, despite the frowns and nods of our hostess, exclaimed, ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... rejoice in Hawthorne and Mark Twain, Henry James and Howells, as Americans can in Dickens and Thackeray, Meredith and Thomas Hardy. And, more than all, Americans own with ourselves all literature in the English tongue before the Mayflower sailed; Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, Raleigh, Ben Jonson, and the authors of the English Bible Version are their spiritual ancestors as much as ever they are ours. The tie of language is all-powerful—for language is the food formative ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... now find only in remoter authours, were in his time accessible and familliar. The fable of "As You Like It", which is supposed to be copied from Chaucer's Gamelyn, was a little pamphlet of those times; and old Mr. Cibber remembered the tale of Hamlet in plain English prose, which the criticks have now to seek in ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... which we now find only in remoter authors, were in his time accessible and familiar. The fable of As you like it, which is supposed to be copied from Chaucer's Gamelyn, was a little pamphlet of those times; and old Mr. Cibber remembered the tale of Hamlet in plain English prose, which the criticks have now to seek ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... am happy to see that your correspondent, Mr. Thoms, is about to illustrate some of the obscurities of Chaucer. Perhaps he or some of your learned contributors may be able to remove a doubt that has arisen in my mind relative to the poet's well-known description of the Manciple in his ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... constantly suggest, not only the possibility, but the probability of epic treatment. It is surprising that the richness of the material, and its notable illustrative quality, did not inspire some earlier Chaucer to combine the incidents in a sustained narrative. But the epic poet did not appear, and the most representative of English popular heroes remains the central figure in a series of detached episodes and adventures, preserved in a long ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... the forests or when the Red Lion turns to bay. But people could not feel about the American saloon as they will feel about the English inns. They could not feel that the Prohibitionist, that vulgar chucker-out, was chucking Chaucer out of the Tabard and Shakespeare out of the Mermaid. In justice to the American Prohibitionists it must be realised that they were not doing quite such desecration; and that many of them felt the saloon a specially poisonous ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... of Richard III. to Henry VIII. In the latter King's reign the royal horses were stabled here, but the name Mews was retained, and has come to be applied to any town range of stabling. The mews were removed to make way for the National Gallery about 1834. Geoffrey Chaucer, the poet, was Clerk of the King's Works, and of the Mews at Charing about the end of Richard II.'s reign. During the Commonwealth Colonel Joyce was imprisoned in the Mews ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... Cp. Quintilian Declam. iv. 10: "Faciamus potius de fine remedium, de necessitate solatium"; Jer. Adv. Rufin. iii. 2: "Habeo gratiam quod facis de necessitate uirtutem"; Ep. 54. 6 (Hilberg): "Arripe, quaeso, occasionem et fac de necessitate uirtutem." Chaucer's "To maken vertu of necessitee" is well known (Knightes Tale, 3042, Squieres Tale, 593, Troilus and Criseyde, ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... pronunciation, enow. The modern pronunciation is founded, as that of many other words is, upon an affected style of speech, ridiculed by Holofernes.[4] The word bread, for example, is almost universally called bred; but in Chaucer's poetry and indeed now in Yorkshire, it ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... the Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison by the Roman Platonist Boethius in A. D. 525, was easily the most popular book of the Middle Ages. It was translated into English by Alfred the Great and by Chaucer, and into many other European languages. It was on these foundations that the French Platonism of the twelfth century, and especially that of the School of Chartres, was built up, and the influence of that school in England was very great ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... their party. There were about twenty; but no less than two thousand were in the city on their way, waiting until the thaw should have opened the Dwina for the rafts and boats which would transport them to Archangel, and then to Solovetsk. It was a scene for Chaucer: the half-idiot, who sought to be a saint; the knave who played upon the charity of others; and the astute hypocrite. The rafts are loaded with corn, and the pilgrims receive a free passage; or a small sum of money is given them, if they consent to row; from forty to sixty sailors being required ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... argue and illustrate instead of telling stories, observe instead of romancing. Captain Sentry 'behaved himself with great gallantry in several sieges' [Footnote: Spectator 2.] but the Spectator does not care for them as Chaucer cares for the battlefields of his Knight. 'One might ... recount' many tales touching on many points in our speculations, and no child and no Elizabethan would refrain from doing so, but the Spectator will not 'go out of the occurrences of common life, but ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... see nothing else. And if he does that he need not be afraid that the conventions of Time and Space will be a hindrance to his book's path. He will be readable a century hence; he will be readable in the Antipodes; and that is as near infinity as any of us, short of Chaucer and Shakespeare, need trouble about. In the country one reads, not skims, the daily paper; and if one's comments are leisurely, perhaps they are all the better. At any rate one is not tempted to see the end of the world in a strike, or a second ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... whose names are of rare occurrence, but who had their parts, though they may have been insignificant ones, in building up their country's literature. Of the great writers, Professor Craik devotes but little space to Shakspeare and Milton, because their works are in everybody's hands; while from Chaucer and Spenser, Swift and Burke, ample specimens are given, the author assuming that their writings are but little read. Indeed, he declares that the great poets and other writers even of the last generation have already faded from the view of the most numerous class of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... always Johnson's Fleet Street' (so Leigh Hunt says); 'the Tower belongs to Julius Caesar, and Blackfriars to Suckling, Vandyke, and the Dunciad...I can no more pass through Westminster without thinking of Milton, or the Borough without thinking of Chaucer and Shakespeare, or Gray's Inn without calling Bacon to mind, or Bloomsbury Square without Steele and Akenside, than I can prefer brick and mortar to wit and poetry, or not see a beauty upon it beyond architecture in the splendour of ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... confined within no terms of blood, years, sex, or whatsoever else. Some furiously rage before they come to discretion, or age. [4730]Quartilla in Petronius never remembered she was a maid; and the wife of Bath, in Chaucer, cracks, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... first series of talks at Tilden Seminary at West Lebanon, New Hampshire, only a few miles from Hanover. President Asa D. Smith of Dartmouth came to hear two of them, and after I had given the whole series from Chaucer to Burns, he took them to Appleton & Company, the New York publishers, who were relatives of his, and surprised me by ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... and fortunes, and English thinkers aspired to know, or dared to doubt, where bigots had been content to wonder and to believe. The same age which produced the Black Prince and Derby, Chandos and Hawkwood, produced also Geoffrey Chaucer and John Wycliffe. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Christian names, and partly to the unsettled state of patronymics in his time), was the son of a lawyer of good family in Florence, and was born in that city on the 14th of May 1265 (sixty-three years before the birth of Chaucer). The stock is said to have been of Roman origin, of the race of the Frangipani; but the only certain trace of it is to Cacciaguida, a Florentine cavalier of the house of the Elisei, who died in the Crusades. Dante gives an account of him in his Paradiso.[2] Cacciaguida ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... A. In Chaucer we find allusions made to imageries, pinnacles, tabernacles, (canopied niches for statuary,) and corbelles. Lydgate, in The Siege of Troy, in his description of the buildings, adverts to those of his own age, and uses several architectural ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... dazzle her with my own erudition, and launched into a harangue that would have done honor to an institute. Pope, Spenser, Chaucer, and the old dramatic writers were all dipped into, with the excursive flight of a swallow. I did not confine myself to English poets, but gave a glance at the French and Italian schools; I passed over Ariosto in full wing, but paused on Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. I dwelt on the character ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... be said of this Academy, with its long roll of heroes in war and in peace, is, that every year the conviction increases among the people of the United States, that its graduates are men who will maintain, at all hazards, the simple virtues of a robust manhood—like Chaucer's young Knight, courteous, lowly, ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... stranger. As Natalie roamed over this vast structure, in itself a world of curiosity, like so many small churches roofed in by one great canopy, she lingered in the south transept, in what is called the Poet's Corner. Here are the tombs of many of the most famous poets of England. Chaucer, Edmund Spencer, Francis Beaumont, and others, have tablets here erected to their memory, while in other chapels are monuments erected in memory of sovereigns, who have long since gone to render an account of their deeds done here, to the ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... importance, in a nation's history, of the individual fame of scholars and literary men. I fear, that it is far greater than the world is willing to acknowledge; or, perhaps I should say, than the world has thought of acknowledging. Blot out from England's history the names of Chaucer, Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton only, and how much of her glory would you blot out with them! Take from Italy such names as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Michel Angelo, and Raphael, and how much would still be wanting to the completeness of her ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... this kind of worship is known, is of Portuguese origin; it is derived from feitico, "made," "artificial" (compare the old English fetys, used by Chaucer); and this term, used of the charms and amulets worn in the Roman Catholic religion of the period, was applied by the Portuguese sailors of the eighteenth century to the deities they saw worshipped by the negroes of the West Coast of Africa. De Brosses, a French savant of last century, brought ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... observe For all the paine thou hast for love and wo All is too lite her mercie to deserve Thou musten then thinke wher er thou ride or go And mortale wounds suffre thou also All for her sake, and thinke it well besette Upon thy love, for it maie not be bette. —Chaucer's 'Court of Love' ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... chapel; and therefore the reader is requested to pay special attention to the following paragraph, modelled carefully after the exordiums of a famous Irish preacher, now drawing crowded houses at the West End of Town. As thus;—"It is the pleasant month of May, when, as in old Chaucer's time, the— ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... beautiful things are to be read in old numbers of the Quarterly Review. But on the whole, English men and women—in mind half Italian, whether they will it or not, from the day they begin to read their own literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare, from Shakespeare to Shelley, from Shelley to Rossetti and Swinburne—were united at that time in warmth of feeling towards struggling Italy as they have been united in no political sentiment relating to another nation, and in few ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... derived direct from the saxon scaelan or scylan, and is found as a principal verb in that language, as well as in ours. In the church homily they say, "To Him alone we schall us to devote ourselves;" we bind or obligate ourselves. Chaucer, an early ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... Queen Elizabeth. I shall order a seat placed in the oratory for Lady Jane Grey and Joan of Arc. I shall invite General Washington to bring some of the choicest cigars from his plantation for Sir Walter Raleigh; and Chaucer, Browning, and Walter Savage Landor, should talk with Goethe, who is to bring Tasso on one arm and ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... collection of poetical extracts from every English and American author worth perusing, from the days of Chaucer to the present ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... sickening jealousy, can he recall! Beatrix thought no more of him than of the lackey that followed her chair. His complaints did not touch her in the least; his raptures rather fatigued her; she cared for his verses no more than for Dan Chaucer's, who's dead these ever so many hundred years; she did not hate him; she rather despised ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... prohibited the use of Latin in public acts. He adopted the native tongue in all his own works, and thus gave to Spanish an honorable eminence, while French and German struggled long for a learning from scholars, and English was to wait a hundred years for the advent of Dan Chaucer. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... overturned letter S. He lived up to the name of Smart. The bookkeeper was a servile echo with a character and a face of putty. He had once perpetrated an opprobrious ode to the overseer, and had answered to the name of Chaucer ever since. ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... years succeeding the treaty of Calais. 1361-69. John Froissart in England. His picture of the life of court and people. The national spirit in English literature. Gower and Minot. Geoffrey Chaucer. The standard English language. Lowland Scottish. The national spirit in art. "Flowing decorated" and "perpendicular" architecture. Contrast between England and Scotland. The national spirit in popular English literature. ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... throwing out the guttural sounds, altering the pronunciation and the quantity, and disusing many words and terms of great significance. In consequence of these innovations, the works of our best poets, such as Chaucer, Spenser, and even Shakespeare, were become, in many parts, unintelligible to the natives of South Britain, whereas the Scots, who retain the antient language, understand them without the help of a glossary. ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... or ridden into the hall where folk sit at banquet: so in Chaucer's Squire's tale, in the ballad of King Estmere, and ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... of being draped like women," as he forcibly expressed it, he would hold up for practical imitation the costumes and handicrafts of the Middle Ages. Further than this retrogressive and imitative movement he never seemed to go. Now, the men of the time of Chaucer had many evil qualities, but there was at least one exhibition of moral weakness they did not give. They would have laughed at the idea of dressing themselves in the manner of the bowmen at the battle of Senlac, or ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... his contemporary. About the same time Boccaccio in his Decamerone gave at once to Italian prose that purity and grace, which none of his successors in the career of literature have ever been able to excel. And in our own island Chaucer with a daring hand redeemed his native tongue from the disuse and ignominy into which it had fallen, and poured out the immortal strains that the genuine lovers of the English tongue have ever since perused with delight, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... in chivalry and statesmanship, which prepared him to fill the throne of Scotland as no man save his great ancestor Bruce had yet filled it, James Stewart was a poet of no mean rank, not unworthy to be named even in the presence of Chaucer, and well worthy of the place which he has kept in literature. We need not enter here into that part of his history which concerns another locality full of great and princely associations—the noble Castle of Windsor, where the royal youth first saw and sang the lady of his love, "the fairest ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... Kentish Glosses. Kentish Sermons. William of Shoreham; with an extract. The Ayenbite of Inwyt. The Apostles' Creed in Old Kentish. The use of e for A.S. y in Kentish. Use of Kentish by Gower and Chaucer. Kentish forms ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... greenwood—and the queer miscellany of life there unfolded and ever changing—a kind of gipsy-like longing for the tent and familiar contact with nature and rude human-nature in the open dates from beyond Chaucer, and remains and will have gratification—the longing for novelty and all the accidents, as it were, of pilgrimage and rude social travel. You see it bubble up, like a true and new nature-spring, through all the surface coatings ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... leather-paper. The panels and beams of ceiling are of stained and dull varnished fir. The drawing room woodwork, and furniture throughout, is painted a mottled greenish blue, after the same manner as the hall. The decorations of this room, when complete, are intended to illustrate Chaucer's "House of Fame." The chimney-piece, of alabaster, is surmounted by a Caen-stone design, on a rock of glass, showing the entrance to the castle, with the various figures mentioned in the poem, carved ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... is sent receive in buxomness; The wrestling of this worlde askith a fall; Here is no home, here is but wildernesse, Forthe, pilgrim, forthe, o best out of thy stall, Loke up on high, and thanke thy God of all. CHAUCER. ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... seemed to lead up to this one. The very lesson on Sunday evening was full of astrology. It was, I may mention, the story of the handwriting on the wall and the triumph of Daniel over the magicians. Then I took up my Chaucer on Monday morning; and instead of the "Canterbury Tales," opened it at the "Treatise on the Astrolabe," which I had never read before, but devoured then as greedily as no doubt did "Little Lowis," to whom it is addressed. All this tended to put me in a proper ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... illuminations and sumptuous bindings, were of course not for the humble student; but working copies, multiplied on a large scale by a roomful of scribes writing simultaneously from dictation, might always be had. Chaucer, writing of the poor clerk of Oxford at the end of the fourteenth ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... intent, but only as language to express his meaning. No act of nature is obscene in itself—but when such words and acts are dragged in for an ulterior purpose they become offensive, as everything out of place is offensive. I think he delighted, too, in shocking—giving resounding slaps on what Chaucer would quite ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... it presented itself to the mediaeval mind. To the mediaeval mind a tragedy meant a narrative rather than a play, and its notion of the matter of this narrative may readily be gathered from Dante or, still better, from Chaucer. Chaucer's Monk's Tale is a series of what he calls 'tragedies'; and this means in fact a series of tales de Casibus Illustrium Virorum,—stories of the Falls of Illustrious Men, such as Lucifer, Adam, Hercules ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... soft'ning accents move, Soft as the strain of constant Emma's love: Or let his fancy choose some jovial theme. As when he told Hans Carvel's jealous dream; Prior th' admiring reader entertains, With Chaucer's ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... Scotswoman, and was left to herself as much as courtesy permitted, except by the young King of the Isle of Wight, a gentle, poetical personage, in somewhat delicate health, with tastes that made him the chosen companion of the scholarly King Henry. He could repeat a great deal of Chaucer's poetry by heart, the chief way in which people could as yet enjoy books, and there was an interchange between them of "Blind Harry" and of the "Canterbury Tales", as they rode side by side, sometimes making their companions laugh, ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... were two Priscillas. There was the Priscilla that her neighbors knew, the Priscilla that went to church, the Priscilla that taught Primary School No. 3. There was the other Priscilla, that read Chaucer and Shakespeare, Moliere and De Stael. With this Priscilla New Geneva had nothing to do. And it was the doubleness of her nature that ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... discussed; that the person of the Deity is carefully withheld from sight, which is more than can be said for the Laureate, who hath thought proper to make him talk, not "like a school-divine,"[497] but like the unscholarlike Mr. Southey. The whole action passes on the outside of heaven; and Chaucer's Wife of Bath, Pulci's Morgante Maggiore, Swift's Tale of a Tub, and the other works above referred to, are cases in point of the freedom with which saints, etc., may be permitted to converse in works not intended ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... of the seven chief castles of Kent. It was here that Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, diplomatist, poet, and lover of Anne Boleyn, who with the gallant and ill-fated Surrey "preluded", in a more exact sense than it could be said of Chaucer, "those melodious bursts that fill the spacious times of great Elizabeth", was able to proclaim, in an epistle ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... appreciation of the character of the offences referred to. It is a curious circumstance, as illustrating the change of men's view of offences, that an ordinary indecent assault, which in the Middle Ages—in Chaucer's time, for instance—would evidently have been regarded as a species of rude joke, should now be deemed one of the most serious ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... began to be famous for the manufacture of falchion heads, arrows, files, and whittles. Chaucer tells us of the ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... child he met. When he was pleased at anything, he used to clap his hands, exclaiming, "Goodie!" "Teddy" envied me "my baccalaureate enthusiasm," and, encouraged evidently by this quality, he would read Chaucer in a sing-song voice, or, when this recreation failed, would make up limericks to a guitar accompaniment. His partner was the one who wore the transposed leggings, and who walked as though ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... the feats of miracle-mongers, and not a little in the way of explaining them. Chaucer was by no means the first to turn shrewd eyes upon wonder-workers and show the clay feet of these popular idols. And since his time innumerable marvels, held to be supernatural, have been exposed for the tricks they were. Yet to-day, if a mystifier ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... well expressed as the desire to be literal as well as poetic will permit them to be. Sternhold's verses compare quite favorably, when looked at either as a whole or with regard to individual lines, with those of other poets of his day, for Chaucer was the only great poet ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... no time to discuss style, Murray," interposed Sir Walter. "Socrates may speak and spell like Chaucer if he pleases; he may even part his infinitives in the middle, for all I care. We have affairs of greater ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... has obviously become contaminated with others (such as Chaucer's Prioresses Tale) in the course of six hundred and fifty years. But the central theme, the murder of a child by the Jews, is itself of great antiquity; and similar charges are on record in Europe even in the nineteenth century. Further material for the ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... could pass the boundaries of sense and meet; or as to Matthew Arnold a refuge from pain and disillusionment. Browning regards the world about him more in the sane, unsentimental, straightforward, intelligible way of Chaucer or of Shakespeare. The mystical elements in Wordsworth's feeling for nature were foreign to Browning's mind. An instructive comparison might be made between Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" and Browning's "Prologue to Asolando." ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... conditions of this essay must be left to explain themselves. It could not have been written at all without the aid of the Publications of the Chaucer Society, and more especially of the labours of the Society's Director, Mr. Furnivall. To other recent writers on Chaucer—including Mr Fleay, from whom I never differ but with hesitation—I have referred, in so far as it was in my power to do so. Perhaps ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... And when you are discontented with the great, and murmur, repiningly, of Marvel in his garret, or Milton in his hiding-place, turn in justice to the Good among the great. Read how John of Lancaster loved Chaucer and sheltered Wicliff. There have been Burkes as well as Walpoles. Russell remembered Banim's widow, and Peel ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous |
