"Chaucer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... apartment was arranged a splendid library, the volumes of which were inestimable, because they consisted, not of actual performances, but of the works which the authors only planned, without ever finding the happy season to achieve them. To take familiar instances, here were the untold tales of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims; the unwritten cantos of the Fairy Queen; the conclusion of Coleridge's Christabel; and the whole of Dryden's projected epic on the subject of King Arthur. The shelves were ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the great landmarks, the general periods—each {5} marked by some towering leader, around whom other contemporary writers may be grouped. In Great Britain the several and successive periods might thus be well designated by such authors as Geoffrey Chaucer or John Wiclif, Thomas More or Henry Howard, Edmund Spenser or Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakspere or Francis Bacon, John Milton or Jeremy Taylor, John Dryden or John Locke, Joseph Addison or Joseph Butler, Samuel Johnson or Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper or John Wesley, Walter ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... 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 two primal ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... knows?—somewhere In Avalon, Isle of Dreams, In vast contentment at last, With every grief done away, While Chaucer and Shakespeare wait, And Moliere hangs on his words, And Cervantes not far off Listens and smiles apart, With that incomparable drawl He is jesting ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... 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 ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... model. For good taste is the characteristic of these poems; they form a comedy of manners, shooting as it flies the folly rather than the wickedness of vice: not wounding with a red-hot iron, but "just flicking with uplifted lash," Horace stands to Juvenal as Chaucer stands to Langland, as Dante to Boccaccio. His theme is life and conduct, the true path to happiness and goodness. I write sermons in sport, he says; but sermons by a fellow-sinner, not by a dogmatic pulpiteer, not by a censor or a cynic. "Conversations" ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... any quantity of French letters, memoirs, and novels, and was a dear student of Dante and Petrarca, and knew German books more cordially than any other person, she was little read in Shakspeare; and I believe I had the pleasure of making her acquainted with Chaucer, with Ben Jonson, with Herbert, Chapman, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, with Bacon, and Sir Thomas Browne. I was seven years her senior, and had the habit of idle reading in old English books, and, though riot much versed, yet quite enough to give me the right to lead her. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... nowhere else. He will rather use 'olli' than 'illi', 'optume' than 'optima', and any bad word rather than any good one, provided he can but prove, that strictly speaking, it is Latin; that is, that it was written by a Roman. By this rule, I might now write to you in the language of Chaucer or Spenser, and assert that I wrote English, because it was English in their days; but I should be a most affected puppy if I did so, and you would not understand three words of my letter. All these, and such like affected peculiarities, are the characteristics ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... taken place, just as surely as you, if you are a Christian, believe that Christ died and rose again; and he represents it with all fidelity and passion: but, as I just now said, he is a man of supreme common sense;—has as much humour and clearness of sight as Chaucer, and as much dislike of falsehood in clergy, or in professedly pious people: and in his gravest moments he will still see and say truly that what is fat, is fat—and what is lean, ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... riding-suit, to see him, which she hath not done these many months I think. By and by in comes Sir J. Minnes and Sir W. Batten, and so we sat talking. Among other things, Sir J. Minnes brought many fine expressions of Chaucer, which he doats on mightily, and without doubt he is ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... whole tragic fact as 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, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... disquisitions on matrimony and the sexes. Homo sum, etc., . . . He was a great reader of Montaigne, and like Montaigne he loved listening to folks, however humble, who (as he put it) knew their subject. Mrs Puckey certainly knew her subject, and if in experience she fell a little short of Chaucer's 'Wife of Bath,' she handled it with something of that lady's freedom, and, in detail, with a plainness ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... when Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales the city was surrounded by a strong wall with twenty-one towers and six gates. Of the wall there are some remains in Broad Street; of the gates "West Gate," through which the pilgrims entered from London, is ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... in the south transept, in the poets' corner, where were erected memorials of the great English writers, that our party was most interested. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Thackeray, Dickens—magic names, names to ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... the country. It was next held by her favourite, Mortimer, and we afterwards find it, throughout the fourteenth century, a sort of appanage of the heir-apparent, and especially of the Duchy of Cornwall, to which it was attached until the Reformation. It was for a moment under the custody of Chaucer's son: it nursed the childhood of Henry VI., but with the beginning of the next century it had already lost its importance. After half that century had passed the castle was already falling into disrepair; much of the masonry of the town and of the fortress, lying squared ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... each separate portion of it was too closely linked to the other to make it possible for the higher classes to tyrannise over the others for any long time. What that society was like is best seen in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Chaucer was in many ways the exact opposite of Langland, and was the precursor of modern literature as Wycliffe was the precursor of modern religion. He was an inimitable story-teller, with an eye which nothing could escape. ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... marble tablet at the back of the tomb to commemorate the embellishment referred to, not without a touch of sarcasm, though, of course, unintentional: "Hoc viri inter inclytos memorandi." Gower died in 1408, eight years after his friend Chaucer. He had been a liberal benefactor to the Church, and founded a chantry in the Chapel of St. John the Baptist, where he was eventually buried. The chapel and chantry are no more, but the monument marks the spot, having been restored in 1894 to its first position. It is in the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... exhausted their arts to discover what a burnet can be, and have given up the chase. Some would have him to be a barnacle goose, others a dab-chick or coot—none of which can fairly be classed as aviculae small birds. Burnet is brown or red brown, and rather bright at that. We have it in Chaucer's "Romaunt of the ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... philological and historical lore. Not the least of this is to be found in the English classics, from which we propose to make one or two selections. We begin where English poetry begins, with Dan Chaucer; and from many beautiful conceits turning upon chess, we select one which must receive universal admiration. It is from the "Booke ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... 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 Cambuscan (Janghz ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... churchyard terrace, and watched the evening tide come up the broad estuary. I have a great liking for Topsham, and that churchyard, overlooking what is not quite sea, yet more than river, is one of the most restful spots I know. Of course the association with old Chaucer, who speaks of Topsham sailors, helps my mood. I came home very tired; but I am not yet decrepit, and for that ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... the suggestion thrown out by your correspondent (Vol. ii., p. 460.) may be acted upon. The admirers of George Herbert are doubtless so numerous, that the correct and complete restoration of Bemerton Church might be effected by means of a small subscription among them, as in the case of the Chaucer monument. Most gladly would I aid in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... it did when it was struck in 1252." It was gold of the purest title (24 carats), weighed the eighth of an ounce, and carried, as you see, on one side the image of St. John Baptist, on the other the Fleur-de-lys. It is the coin which Chaucer takes for the best representation of beautiful money in the Pardoner's Tale: this, in his judgment, is the fairest mask of Death. Villani's relation of its moral and commercial effect at Tunis is worth translating, being in the substance of it, ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... to warn all honest men to beware of No. 007 Field Company, R.E., known to its victims as "Chaucer's Gang," the most conscienceless crew of body-snatchers and common thieves in all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... after the appearance of Dryden's Juvenal and Persius Rymer prefixed to his translation of Rene Rapin's Reflections on Aristotle's Poesie some Reflections of his own on Epic Poets. Herein he speaks under the head Epic Poetry of Chaucer, in whose time language was not capable of heroic character; or Spenser, who "wanted a true Idea, and lost himself by following an unfaithful guide, besides using a stanza which is in no wise proper for our language;" of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... and the neglected. Just now we are trying to teach them how to make use of the free library, to direct their choice of books. I must tell you that a favourite study of mine is Old English, and I'm sure it would be so good if our working classes could be brought to read Chaucer and Langland and Wycliffe and so on. One can't expect them to study foreign languages, but these old writers would serve them for a philological training, which has such an excellent effect on the mind. I know a family—shockingly poor living, four of them, in two rooms—who ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... up his abode at Rome when very young, and mingled freely in the gayest society, the expensive pleasures of which made great inroads upon his moderate wealth. Like other Romans, he looked to a career in the provinces for means of improving his fortune, but was disappointed, and like our own Chaucer, but more frequently, he pours forth lamentations to his empty purse. He was evidently a friend of most of the prominent men of letters of his time, and he entered freely into the debauchery of the period. Thus his verse gives a representation of the debased manners of the day in gay society. ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... character 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 ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... reasonable prospect of plunder. Indeed, he was a very matter-of-fact person, with very little sense of romance, and little taste for adventure unless there was something to be got out of it. We must dismiss from our minds the pretty superstitions of romance from Chaucer and Spenser to the time of the Romantic revival, and we must understand that the people of the Middle Ages were very much like ourselves; the times were rougher, more disorderly, there was much less ...
— Progress and History • Various
... of Terence," said he, "omnibus nobis ut res dant sese; ita magni aut humiles sumus.' When the King's commissioners hear of the King's navy from Spain, they are in such jollity that they talk loud. . . . In the mean time—as the wife of Bath sath in Chaucer by her husband, we owe them not a word. If we should die tomorrow; I hope her Majesty will find by our writings that the honour of the cause, in the opinion of the world, must be with her Majesty; and that her commissioners are, neither of such ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... garbed appropriately 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. When the ceremony of introduction was ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... was Chaucer, and the great English philologists feel sure that he must have made many new words and made many rare words common; but it is not easy to say that Chaucer made any particular word, because we do not ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... The Biblic books and prophets, and deep idyls of the Nazarene, The Iliad, Odyssey, plots, doings, wanderings of Eneas, Hesiod, Eschylus, Sophocles, Merlin, Arthur, The Cid, Roland at Roncesvalles, the Nibelungen, The troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, skalds, Chaucer, Dante, flocks of singing birds, The Border Minstrelsy, the bye-gone ballads, feudal tales, essays, plays, Shakespere, Schiller, Walter Scott, Tennyson, As some vast wondrous weird dream-presences, The great shadowy groups gathering around, Darting their mighty masterful eyes ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... the realm where alone the divine and the human 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
... thought, sometimes for a hundred lines together, but it is when he has got into a track of Scripture. His antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity; for therein he imitated Spenser, as Spencer did Chaucer. And though, perhaps, the love of their masters may have transported both too far in the frequent use of them, yet in my opinion obsolete words may then be laudably revived when either they are more sounding or more significant than those in practice, and when ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... 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 high degree, have gone to the making of it: a tasteful ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... pages of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare with the Eglantine! This delicious plant, known here as SWEETBRIAR (R. rubIginosa), emits its very aromatic odor from russet glands on the under, downy side of the small leaflets, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... Greets him, their brother, on the Stygian beach; Proudly a gaunt right hand doth Dante reach; Milton and Wordsworth bid him welcome home; Bright Keats to touch his raiment doth beseech; Coleridge, his locks aspersed with fairy foam, Calm Spenser, Chaucer suave, His equal friendship crave: And godlike spirits hail him guest, in speech Of Athens, Florence, Weimar, ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... of human life: and some future critic will probably say that the tale of the Tower of Babel cannot be older than the Eiffel Tower, because there was certainly a confusion of tongues at the Paris Exhibition. Most of the mediaeval remains familiar to the modern reader are necessarily "late," such as Chaucer or the Robin Hood ballads; but they are none the less, to a wiser criticism, worthy of attention and even trust. That which lingers after an epoch is generally that which lived most luxuriantly in it. It is an excellent habit to read history ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... the Middle Ages this work was highly esteemed, and numerous translations appeared. In the ninth century Alfred the Great gave to his subjects an Anglo-Saxon version; and in the fourteenth century Chaucer made an English translation, which was published by Caxton in 1480. Before the sixteenth century it was translated into German, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... and by the second a daughter, married afterwards to Mr. Fane. He died 6th December, 1718, in the forty-fifth year of his age, and was buried on the 19th of the same month in Westminster Abbey, in the aisle where many of our English poets are interred, over against Chaucer, his body being attended by a select number of his friends, and the dean and choir officiating ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... rum seemed always to stand at the same level. Poetry was there: the left-hand corner of the room was lined with as complete a set of English classics as the right hand could show of English and foreign physiologists. But if one took a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that rank, its absence irritated the mind like a gap in a man's front teeth. One could not say the books were never read; probably they were, but there was a sense of their being chained to their places, like the ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... having close affinities to Irish and Welsh. This tongue Burns did not know. Lowland Scots is a dialect of English, descended from the Northumbrian dialect of Anglo-Saxon. It has had a history of considerable interest. Down to the time of Chaucer, whose influence had much to do with making the Midland dialect the literary standard for the Southern kingdom, it is difficult to distinguish the written language of Edinburgh from that of York, both being developments ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... Chaucer for strength," he advises Stoddard on January 7, 1850, "read Spenser for ease and sweetness, read Milton for sublimity and thought, read Shakespeare for all these things, and for something else which is his alone. Get out of your age ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... confined for weeks and months within the dusky enclosures of London, to break his bounds and emerge into the breathing fields of Surry and Kent. The father of English poetry, and poet of English pilgrims, Chaucer himself, stands ready to accompany us for at least a small portion of our route: it was along the road on which we enter, that he conducted, ages ago, those pilgrims to the shrine of Canterbury who still live in his verses; and we may glance ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... flat back and breast and indented sides, to which belonged the veille, videl, or as it has been called, guitar-fiddle, and the pear-shaped type, such as the gigue and rebec. The latter is what Chaucer calls the rubible. ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... Austin, the Laureate of our own day, has recently written in an article, entitled, “The Essentials of Great Poetry,” that the English masters of song are, Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron, and he tells us that only the merest fraction of Wordsworth’s work is real poetry. Anna Seward would seem to have agreed with the selection of these names, ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... thurg[h] vnto his hert Was hurt vnwarly by castyng of an eye On fair fresh the lusty yong Emelye And al the stryf bytwene hym & his brother And how that one faug[h]t wit[h] that other Wit[h]yn the groue, til they by Theseus Accorded were as Chaucer tellet[h] vs And furthermore as I gan beholde I sawe hou phebus wit[h] an arowe of golde Y wounded was ...
— The Temple of Glass • John Lydgate
... From Chaucer to Tennyson, with Biographical Sketches, a rapid view of the characteristic attributes of both, and an Introductory Essay on the Origin and Progress of English Poetical Literature. ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... 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
... without, and let his thoughts drift back to the time when this huge hulk had first cast a slender shadow over the greensward of primitive, Saxon England. It was a massive tree before the Domesday Book was begun; Chaucer would not be heard of for four hundred years to come; and where was Shakespeare? What was suspected of America? Yet here was this venerable vegetable, still with life enough left in it, perhaps, to see the end of English monarchy. The yew was a fact; ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... In Chaucer (Tale of Melibocus) we find, "The prophete saith: Flee shrewdnesse, and do goodnesse" (referring to Ps. ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... humorous originality. Though he had in his possession scarce a dozen volumes, Alexander was really a bookish man and something of a scholar; his quotations, which were frequent, ranged from Homer to Horace, from Chaucer to Tennyson. He recited a few of his own poetical compositions, and they might have been worse; Piers made him glow and sparkle with ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... been called Poets' Corner since the burial of Spenser, who was the darling of his generation. But the grave of Chaucer, "the father of English poetry," had consecrated the aisle to poetry long before. Chaucer was not given honourable sepulture here because he was a poet, but only from the accidental fact that he happened to be Clerk of the Works at Westminster ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... way at the butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique hospitality: the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen fire-places, cordial recesses; ovens whose first pies were baked four centuries ago; and spits which have cooked for Chaucer! Not the meanest minister among the dishes but is hallowed to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes forth ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Andronicus, and Ennius; so in the Italian language, the first that made it to aspire to be a treasure-house of science, were the poets Dante, Boccace, and Petrarch; so in our English were Gower and Chaucer; after whom, encouraged and delighted with their excellent foregoing, others have followed to beautify our mother tongue, as well in the ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... 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 respite to make her choise: upon this triall, Qui bien aime tard oublie-'He that loveth ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... that gentler wits should breed, Where thickskin chuffs laugh at a scholar's need. But softly may our honour's ashes rest, That lie by merry Chaucer's noble chest. But, I pray thee, proceed briefly in thy censure, that I may be proud of myself; as in the first, so in the last, my censure may jump with thine.—Henry Constable, Samuel ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... Was my life evil? Did I think in secret that which might not be done openly? Well, some things I did secretly. Ye shall hear of them. I read where I might, and after my taste, many plays, and found in them beauty and the soul of deep things. Tales I have read, but a few, and John Milton, and Chaucer, and Bacon, and Montaigne, and Arab poets also, whose books my uncle sent me. Was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... knotty, half-black or brown, and generally unluminous—flowers I can scarcely call them—and weeds I will not,—creatures, at all events, in nowise to be gathered under the general name 'Composed,' with the stars that crown Chaucer's Alcestis, when she returns to the ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... was for the third time Lord Mayor of London in this reign, A.D. 1419. Thomas Chaucer, son of the great poet, was speaker of the House of Commons, which granted the supplies to the king for his invasion ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... be persevering To seek honour without feintise or slouth Fro wele to better in all manner thing.' CHAUCER:—The Floure and the Leafe. ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... advent of Chaucer a new poet, a new language, and new themes appear. Many of his Canterbury tales are miniature epics, borrowed in general from other writers, but retold with a charm all his own. The Knight's Tale, or story of the rivalry in love of Palamon and Arcite, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... of one of the finest passages in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, represents the Good Parson as choosing to resign his benefice rather than acknowledge the Duke of Lancaster to be King of England. For this representation no warrant can be found in Chaucer's Poem, or any where else. Dryden wished to write something that would gall the clergy who had taken the oaths, and therefore attributed to a Roman Catholic priest of the fourteenth century a superstition ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Chaucer's in this: that it had in it a sample of about all the upper occupations and professions the country could show, and a corresponding variety of costume. There were young men and old men, young women ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... still retaines More of the maid to sight, than Husbands paines; We pray our Play may be so; For I am sure It has a noble Breeder, and a pure, A learned, and a Poet never went More famous yet twixt Po and silver Trent: Chaucer (of all admir'd) the Story gives, There constant to Eternity it lives. If we let fall the Noblenesse of this, And the first sound this child heare, be a hisse, How will it shake the bones of that ...
— The Two Noble Kinsmen • William Shakespeare and John Fletcher [Apocrypha]
... The Spiritual Ebb and Flow exhibited in English Poetry from Chaucer to Tennyson and Browning. {This section contains ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... has sold a portion of his library, consisting of early editions of SHAKSPEARE and CHAUCER, to an American dealer for L200,000. His Grace is said to have calculated that, if he replaced these books by the nice handy little editions which are now to be obtained for sixpence and a shilling a-piece, the transaction would mean a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... sometimes by Tennyson. His literary career has been contemporary with the sensational school, but he has been entirely untainted by it, and in the present volume, "Tales of a Wayside Inn," his style has a tranquil lucidity which recalls Chaucer. The literary style of an intellectually introverted age or author will always be somewhat obscure, however gorgeous; but Longfellow's mind takes a simple, child-like hold of life, and his style never betrays the inadequate effort to describe thoughts or emotions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... the Martyrdom of Hugh is attributed by Matthew Paris to 1225. Chaucer puts a version in the mouth of his Prioress. No doubt the story must have been a mere excuse for Jew-baiting. In America the Jew becomes "The Duke" in a version picked up by Mr. Newells, from the recitation of a street boy in New York. The daughter of a Jew is not more likely than the daughter ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... murder kept alive whatever was yet known in the art, and gradually transferred it to the Western World. Indeed the Jewish school was always respectable, even in the dark ages, as the case of Hugh of Lincoln shows, which was honored with the approbation of Chaucer, on occasion of another performance from the same school, which he puts into the mouth ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... of Geoffrey Chaucer in Westminster Abbey is fast mouldering into irretrievable decay. A sum of One Hundred Pounds will effect a perfect repair. The Committee have not thought it right to fix any limit to the subscription, they themselves ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... 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 ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... tale of the intellectual state of the clergy. They were ceasing in fact to be an intellectual class at all. The monasteries were no longer seats of learning. "I find in them," says Poggio, an Italian scholar who visited England some twenty years after Chaucer's death, "men given up to sensuality in abundance but very few lovers of learning and those of a barbarous sort, skilled more in quibbles and sophisms than in literature." The statement is no doubt coloured by the contempt ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... to the neglect of those of their own. He knew English literature and loved English literature as well as if he had never scanned a Latin line or conjugated a Greek verb or read a page of Moliere, or Calderon, or Metastasio. He knew Chaucer as well as it was possible for any one then or for generations later to know Chaucer, and he appreciated him as few have appreciated him before or since. The poets of his own time were as dear to him in their degree as the singer of England's morning song. It is hardly necessary to say that he ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... him twice as muckle as Time," [Footnote: Chaucer says, there is nothing new but what it has been old. The reader has here the original of an anecdote which has since been fathered on a Scottish Chief of our own time.] said Archie Armstrong, the Court fool, who chanced to be present when the king stated this dilemma. ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... excommunicated citizen as civilis mortuus, legally dead. Fenelon writes, "God has kindled a flame at the bottom of every heart, which should always burn as a lamp for him who hath lighted it; and all other life is as death." Chaucer says, in one of his Canterbury Tales, referring to a man ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... between the lovely entourage of this notorious place and the triviality and vulgar nature of its commerce. The one long, winding street may be described as a vast bazaar, more suited to Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims than to holders of railway tickets and contemporaries of the ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... marooned, that is, confined (as regarded his residence) to one desert island, and marooned also as to books, confined I mean (as regarded his reading) to one sole book, his choice (if he read English) would probably oscillate between Shakspeare and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Now, the Canterbury Tales had been finished about thirty-five years before Agincourt; so exquisitely false, even in this point, is Pope's account. Against the nothing of beggarly France was even then to be set a work which has not been rivalled, and probably ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... custom of the Caskodens for centuries to keep a record of events, as they have happened, both private and public. Some are in the form of diaries and journals like those of Pepys and Evelyn; others in letters like the Pastons'; others again in verse and song like Chaucer's and the Water Poet's; and still others in the more pretentious form of memoir and chronicle. These records we always have kept jealously within our family, thinking it vulgar, like the Pastons, to submit our ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... Liverpool; Leigh-street after the Leighs; Cases-street after the Cases. Mr. Rose, who projected many streets at the north end of the town on his extensive property, seems to have adopted the poets' names to distinguish his thoroughfares, as in Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Juvenal, Virgil, Dryden, Milton, Sawney (Alexander) Pope-street, etc. Meadows-street, Scotland-road, was named after Mr. William Meadows, who married six wives. His first wife lived two years. He next married Peggy Robinson, who lived twenty years, and bore ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... of us two must bowen douteless, And, sith a man is more reasonable Than woman is, ye [men] moste be suffrable. —CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales. ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... framework story like The 1001 Nights, the three stories told by Conall being framed, as it were, in a fourth which is nominally the real story. This method employed by the Indian story-tellers and from them adopted by Boccaccio and thence into all European literatures (Chaucer, Queen Margaret, &c.), is generally thought to be peculiar to the East, and to be ultimately derived from the Jatakas or Birth Stories of the Buddha who tells his adventures in former incarnations. Here we find it in Celtdom, and it occurs also ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... their murderous deeds of old, The grisly story Chaucer told, And many an ugly tale beside Of children caught and crucified; I heard the ducat-sweating thieves Beneath the Ghetto's slouching eaves, And, thrust beyond the tented green, The ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in the dawn-flush of the Renaissance in Italy. The Italian language was just evolving itself, under the genius of Dante, from a mere jumble of dialects into a literary language. Dante did for Italy what Chaucer was soon after to do for England. On the one side influenced by the Renaissance and the birth of the new Italian language, on the other by the Jewish revival of letters in Spain and Provence, the Italian Jews alone combined the Jewish spirit with the spirit ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... qui dicuntur de familia Goliae: so run the acts of several Church Councils.[10] The word passed into modern languages. The Grandes Chroniques de S. Denis speak of jugleor, enchanteor, goliardois, et autres manieres de menestrieux. Chaucer, in his description of the Miller, calls this merry narrator of fabliaux a jangler and a goliardeis. In Piers Ploughman the goliardeis is further explained to be a glutton of words, and talks in ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... lay in the new and vivid life which he imparted to the fables of Greek mythology. 'No other classical poet has furnished more ideas than Ovid to the Italian poets and painters of the Renaissance, and to our own poets—from Chaucer to Pope, who, ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... to distinguish them from the droll productions of Bunbury and others. They have this difference, that we do not merely laugh at, we are led into long trains of reflection by them. In this respect they resemble the characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims, which have strokes of humor in them enough to designate them for the most part as comic, but our strongest feeling still is wonder at the comprehensiveness of genius which could crowd, as poet and painter have done, into one small ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... abuses. He 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
... it is a very pretty sight,' he said, warming up to the proceedings. 'But you dance too well—you dance all over your person—and that's too thorough a way for the present day. I should say it was exactly how they danced in the time of your poet Chaucer; but as people don't dance like it now, we must consider. First I must inquire more about this ball, and then I must see ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... the judgment of Sancho's kinsmen. To what purpose should a Frenchman, writing in the time of Louis XIV., censure the rapacity of innkeepers, and the wretchedness of their extorted accommodation, when France, from the time of Chaucer to the present hour, has been famous for the civility of the one and the convenience of the other? To what purpose, if the French government were to be criticised, enumerate the danger of high-roads, and the caverns unexplored by a negligent administration, in which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... the angels;"—these make up pretty nearly the amount of our undisputed report. It may be doubted, indeed, whether at this day we arc as accurately acquainted with the life of Shakspeare as with that of Chaucer, though divided from each other by an interval of two centuries, and (what should have been more effectual towards oblivion) by the wars of the two roses. And yet the traditional memory of a rural and a sylvan region, such as Warwickshire at that ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... could hardly fail to have, unless it belied its model altogether;—but it is as far as possible from giving any notion of the characteristic qualities of "Reinaert de Vos." If Mr. Arnold must change the measure, Chaucer's "Nonnes Preestes Tale" would have been a safer guide ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... metropolis of the 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 ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... 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
... Chaucer, She had been upon the shelf, For same reason he'll divorce her, Pity—this ...
— Why They Married • James Montgomery Flagg
... we'm, you'm, they'm, for we, you, they, are, there is a constant tendency to pleonasm in some cases, as well as to contraction, and elision in others. Thus we have a lost, agone, abought, &c., for lost, gone, bought, &c., Chaucer has many of these prefixes; but he often uses y instead of a, as ylost. The frequent use of Z and V, the softened musical sounds for S and F, together with the frequent increase and multiplication of vowel sounds, give the dialect a by no means inharmonious expression, certainly it would not ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... 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 one great Sovereign of the universe. ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... 5 Chaucer his sense can only boast; The glory of his numbers lost! Years have defaced his matchless strain; And yet he did not sing ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... 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
... that she and Mr. Blackwood had just received some very rare old books from Europe," she said, "among them a Chaucer,—and beside that, a charming Corot; so, Fee, both you and papa will have something to enjoy, while Nora and I are ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... trade alone. 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 forgot ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... Dame Joan would send word touching some matter unto Dame Agnes here, falleth she a-saying unto herself of Dan Chaucer's brave Romaunt of ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... pleasure) 'This word is correctly used.' Of course it was impossible that Chatterton should have produced even a colourable imitation of fifteenth-century poetry at a time when even Malone—for all his acknowledged reputation as an English Scholar—could not quote Chaucer so as to make his lines scan. The Rowley Poems and Percy's Reliques mark the beginning of that renascence of our older poetry so conspicuous in the time of Lamb and Hazlitt. Before this epoch was the Augustan age, much too well satisfied with its own literature ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... Payne followed the law, and with success, but his heart was with the Muses and the odorous East. From a boy he had loved and studied the old English, Scotch and Welsh writers, with the result that all his productions have a mediaeval aroma. The Faerie Queene, Chaucer and his successors—the Scottish poets of the 15th and 16th Centuries, The Morte d'Arthur, the authorised version of the Bible and North's Plutarch have always lain at his elbow. Then, too, with Dante, Shakespeare and Heine's poems he is supersaturated; ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... disputed; it is probably Saxon—baec, back, gamen, game; i.e. a game in which the players are liable to be sent back. Other derivations are, Dan. bakke, tray, gammen, game (Wedgwood); and Welsh bach, little, cammaun, battle (Henry). Chaucer alludes to a game of "tables," played with three dice, in which "men" were moved from the opponent's "tables," the game (ludus Anglicorum) being described in the Harleian MSS. (1527). The French name for backgammon is trictrac, imitative of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... date of this poem is about A.D. 1360. Shakespeare has both forms, viz.: sweeting and sweet-heart. Chaucer has swete herte, just as we ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... garmentes?' Soe thatt itt often comes to passe thatt whenn walkyng in ye Broade Waye of New-Yorke, yee can tell a Philadelphienne by hir sober yet rich garbe, so that ye Cosmopolite sayth: 'Per ma fe! thatt is a ladye, I know shee is, by the waye shee lookes.' And trulie, as Dan Chaucer sayeth, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... sea by one or two twisted and narrow paths, as people find a subterranean lake. Thus the British Navy is really national because it is natural; it has cohered out of hundreds of accidental adventures of ships and shipmen before Chaucer's time and after it. But the German Navy is an artificial thing; as artificial as a constructed Alp would be in England. William II. has simply copied the British Navy as Frederick II. copied the French Army: and this Japanese or ant-like assiduity in imitation is one of the ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... Frank; of course I'll think over what you say. But really Queensberry ought to be in a madhouse. He's too absurd," and in that spirit he left me, outwardly self-confident. He might have remembered Chaucer's words: ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... law cannot pursue,' i. 172. What Grecian states had laws more lenient to women? 4. What traces can be found in history or legend of the victory of Theseus over the Amazons, and the rise of a new civic order on the ruins of a matriarchate? 5. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe (see Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women' for an early English use of the story). 6. Explanation of allusions to Phoebe, ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... recognized at all abroad. Yet I firmly believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time. Chaucer is anterior; and on other grounds, too, he cannot well be brought into the comparison. But taking the roll of our chief poetical names, besides Shakespeare and Milton, from the age of Elizabeth downwards, and going through it,—Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... a subscriber," I called down, supposing the visitor to be merely an agent. "I took the magazine, and a set of Chaucer in a revolving bookcase, from one of their agents last month and have ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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 Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... instead 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 painting themselves an aesthetic blue, after the custom of the ancient ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... will needs request A short account of all the Muse-possess'd, That, down from Chaucer's days to Dryden's times, Have spent their noble rage in British rhymes; Without more preface, writ in formal length, To speak the undertaker's want of strength, I'll try to make their several beauties known, And show their verses' ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... book on language in that it deals essentially with the 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, a bowing acquaintance with Latin and French being ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism." Dealing with only one form of the social phenomenon, with sensualism so far as it appeared to affect contemporary poetry, the writer proceeded with a literary retrospect intended to show that the fair dawn of our English poetry in Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists had been overclouded by a portentous darkness, a darkness "vaporous," "miasmic," coming from a "fever-cloud generated first in Italy and then blown westward," sucking up on its way "all that was most unwholesome ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... teacher, I Lessons assigned are | questions on the | may not have enough not heard. Students | lesson. The answers are| specific facts to seldom recite. Written | written out on the | pass. We began Chaucer quizzes on themes of | blackboards. After | last week. He spent a assigned reading are | fifteen minutes all | good part of each rated by an assistant. | students take their | session reading to us. The work comes back | seats and the work on | All of us were with an ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... beyond the ruins of Sandown Castle there is an old inn, called the "Checkers of the Hope," or "The Checkers," named after, it is said, and corrupted from, "Chaucer's Inn" at Canterbury. It stands in the midst of the solitary waste; a sort of half-way house between the towns of Sandwich and Deal; far removed from either, however, and quite beyond earshot of any human dwelling. This, so says report, was a celebrated resort of smugglers in days ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... the noblest society the world has ever known, and it is the recollection of this companionship which gives those days under college roofs a unique and perennial charm. Then first the spirit of our own race was revealed to us in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton; then first we thrilled to that music which has never faltered since Caedmon found his voice in answer to the heavenly vision. There are days which will always have a place by themselves in our memory, nights whose stars have never set, because they brought us face to ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... up among history and literature, can't always remember which is real and which is make-up. It's a fact. I put down Portia as history in my exercise yesterday, and said the story of the Spanish Armada was told by Chaucer. Now you're laughing, and you look more like Ulyth Stanton. Sit down on this bed. There! Open your mouth and shut your eyes, and see what the king will ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... sustains you; weariness does not overwhelm you; in isolation you see no charms for vanity; personal pride is greatly moderated. Nor shall your title of citizenship exclude you from worlds of imagination or of devotion. The Comic spirit is not hostile to the sweetest songfully poetic. Chaucer bubbles with it: Shakespeare overflows: there is a mild moon's ray of it (pale with super-refinement through distance from our flesh and blood planet) in Comus. Pope has it, and it is the daylight side of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was further illuminated by that mysterious, visionary, titanic, Teutonic epic, the Niebelungen Lied; and a little later appeared the troubadours in the south of Europe and the minnesingers (love-singers) in Germany. Next came Dante and Giotto in Italy, then Chaucer in England; so that by the end of the fourteenth century, poetry and the arts, the offspring of the beautiful,—and who can have no other parentage,—had established themselves in the modern European mind, and have since, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... first a professed Christian, but in reality a Druid, whose poems fling great light on the doctrines of the primitive priesthood of Europe, which correspond remarkably with the philosophy of the Hindus, before the time of Brahma: the second the grand poet of Nature, the contemporary of Chaucer, but worth half a dozen of the accomplished word-master, the ingenious versifier of Norman and Italian tales: the third a learned and irreproachable minister of the Church of England, and one of the greatest poets of the last century, who after several narrow escapes from starvation ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... endless round of social amusements, or to "the proper study of mankind" with all varieties and countless specimens of the genus collected for his inspection. It is only the zealous investigator, primed with the associations of English literature from Chaucer to Dickens, who will be apt to put himself under Mr. Hare's guidance, and to explore patiently the widely-separated districts in which lie scattered and almost hidden the relics that attest the identity of London through the ages of growth and change that have transformed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... court of Theodoric the Goth; put to death by Theodoric without trial on the charge of treason and magic; his famous work "De Consolatione Philosophiae" probably written while in prison in Pavia; parts of that work translated by Alfred the Great and Chaucer; secured much influence for the works of Aristotle by his ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... once in existence a copy of Speght's edition of Chaucer, 1598, with manuscript notes by Gabriel Harvey, one of those notes being in the following terms: "The younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, but his Lucrece and his tragedy of Hamlet, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... art spread all over the intelligent world, and more especially in France; it was not contented with merely architectural forms in colourless cathedrals, but decorated them with carvings painted in gay colours, used every space for pictures, drew upon all literature for its materials. In Dante, Chaucer, and Petrarch, in the German Niebelungenlied, in the French romances, in the Icelandic Sagas, in Froissart and the chroniclers, you may find the same spirit; and each town smote its own epic into ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... know whether there had not been a rare good poet in England, called Chaucer. Verily there had been, said the knight; and on a little solicitation, so soon as supper was over, he recited to the eager and delighted auditors the tale of patient Grisel, as rendered by Chaucer, calling forth eager comments from both ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... blended; and he grew up in a country thickly settled with men whose ancestors came along with his from across the water. Till a century ago the barony of Forth retained a dialect of its own which was in effect such English as men spoke before Chaucer began to write; and even to-day in any Wexford fair or market you will see among the strong, well-nourished, prosperous farmers many faces and figures which an artist might easily assimilate to an athletic example of the traditional John Bull. Redmond ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... 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 ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... There is pagan Latin and Christian Latin: Burns' poems are beautiful, and they are not written in Southern English; Chaucer's verse is exquisitely melodious, although it will not scan to modern pronunciation. In the earliest Christian poetry there is a tendency to write by accent rather than by quantity, but that does not say that the hymns have not a quaint Gothic music of their own. This is very noticeable in Sedulius, ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... 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 respond. Or perhaps, ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... dread. The best thing that can 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 ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... at Cirencester (with Engravings). The Congress of Vienna and Prince de Ligne. Letter of H.R.H. the Duke of York in 1787. Monuments in Oxford Cathedral (with two Plates). Michael Drayton and his "Idea's Mirrour." Date of the erection of Chaucer's Tomb. Letters of Dr. Maitland and Mr. Stephens on The Ecclesiastical History Society: with Remarks. The British Museum Catalogue and Mr. Panizzi. Reviews of Correspondence of Charles V., the Life of Southey, &c., &c., Notes of the Month, Literary and Antiquarian Intelligence, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 44, Saturday, August 31, 1850 • Various
... story is not a happy one, but the lines are harmonious. It is often worth our while to inquire how poetry has become such as it is, and how the altered and improved phases of versification have arisen. To trace our melody from Chaucer to Tennyson is matter of interest to us all. Of Cicero as a poet we may say that he found Latin versification rough, and left it smooth and musical. Now, as we go on with the orator's life and prose works, we need not return ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... to be famous for the manufacture of falchion heads, arrows, files, and whittles. Chaucer tells us ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... 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 ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... Dante, a more sublime and original genius than Petrarch, was 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
... servitude, and the word translates the villanus of Domesday Book, although it also covers classes other than the villani. The form ceorl soon became cherl, as in Havelok the Dane (ante 1300) and several times in Chaucer. and subsequently churl. Taking a less technical sense than the ceorl of Anglo-Saxon law, churl, or cherl was used in general to mean a "man," and more particularly a "husband." In this sense it was ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... he was not indisposed to enhance the dignity of the wreath by classing Chaucer and Spenser, as we have seen, among its wearers. The genuine claims of Warton to respect probably saved him from the customary attacks. Bating a few bungling thrusts amid the doggerel of "Peter Pindar," he escaped scathless,—gaining, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... all writers, the one of whom all Englishmen are naturally the most proud, Shakspere, has, it is true, an abundant association with Warwickshire, but Shakspere stands almost alone in this, as in many things. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Byron and Keats were born in London; they travelled widely, they lived in many different counties or countries, and cannot be said to have adorned any distinctively local tradition. Shelley was ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... nature thus Ennobles both the sentient and the dead;— The human heart is as an altar wreathed, On which old wine pours, streaming o'er the leaves, And down the symbol-carved sides. Behold! Unbidden, yet most welcome, who be these? The high-priests of this altar, poet-kings;— Chaucer, still young with silvery beard that seems Worthy the adoration of a child; And Spenser, perfect master, to whom all Sweet graces ministered. The shut eye weaves A picture;—the immortals pass along Into ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... we learn from Chaucer, were used in England as late as the fifteenth century. When epistles were written upon tables of wood they were usually tied together with cord, the seal being put upon the knot. Some of the table-books must have been large and heavy, for in Plautus a schoolboy seven years old is represented ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... 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
... was an English piece having the same subject as the Knighte's Tale of Chaucer, and called Palamon and Arcite. It would be pleasant to know that the poet followed as far as possible the words of Chaucer. There is a fine incident narrated connected with the performance. In the scene of the ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... precedents, and one volume, in his handwriting, which is still extant, consists of three hundred and forty-four closely-written folio pages. There was in that gloomy office an edition of Camden's "Britannia," and, having borrowed from Mr. Green, a bookseller, Speight's "Chaucer," he compiled therefrom an ingenious glossary, for his own use, in two parts. "The first," Mr. Dix says, "contained old words, with the modern English—the second, the modern English, with the old words; this enabled him to turn modern English into old, as an English and Latin dictionary enables ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... stimulus given by Mundinus to the study of anatomy would have borne fruit, but little was done in science during the two and a half centuries that followed the delivery of his lectures and still less in the art. While William of Wykeham was building Winchester Cathedral and Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales, John of Gaddesden in practice was blindly following blind leaders whose authority ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... Americans. Without an effort we 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 of minds. A volume could be written on the formation of ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy |
