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tenderly lamented, and thus sublimely commemorated, but a mere allegorical personage, the creation of a poet's fancy? Nothing can come of nothing; and it was no unreal or imaginary being who turned the course of Dante's ardent passions and active spirit, and burning enthusiasm, into one sweeping torrent of love and poetry, and gave to Italy and to the world the Divina Commedia !

CHAPTER X.

CHAUCER AND PHILIPPA PICARD.

AFTER Italy, England,-who has ever trod in her footsteps, and at length outstript her in the race of intellect,-was the next to produce a great and prevailing genius in poetry, a master-spirit, whom no change of customs, manners, or language, can render wholly obsolete; and who was destined, like the rest of his tribe, to bow before the influence of woman, to toil in her praise, and soar by her inspiration.

Seven years after the death of Dante, Chaucer was born, and he was twenty-four years younger

than Petrarch, whom he met at Padua in 1373; this meeting between the two great poets was memorable in itself, and yet more interesting for having first introduced into the English language that beautiful monument to the virtue of women, -the story of Griselda.

Boccaccio had lately sent to his friend the MS. of the Decamerone, of which it is the concluding tale: the tender fancy of Petrarch, refined by a forty years' attachment to a gentle and elegant female, passed over what was vicious and blameable, or only recommended by the wit and the style, and fixed with delight on the tale of Griselda; so beautiful in itself, and so honourable to the sex whom he had poetically deified in the person of one lovely woman. He amused his leisure hours in translating it into Latin, and having finished his version, he placed it in the hands of a citizen of Padua, and desired him to read it aloud. His friend accordingly began; but as he proceeded, the overpowering pathos of the story so affected him, that he was obliged to stop; he began again, but was

unable to proceed; the gathering tears blinded him, and choked his voice, and he threw down the manuscript. This incident, which Petrarch himself relates in a letter to Boccaccio, occurred about the period when Chaucer passed from Genoa to Padua to visit the poet and lover of Laura

Quel grande, alla cui fama angusto è il mondo.

Petrarch must have regarded the English poet with that wondering, enthusiastic admiration with which we should now hail a Milton or a Shakspeare sprung from Otaheite or Nova Zembla ; and his heart and soul being naturally occupied by his latest work, he repeated the experiment he had before tried on his Paduan friend. The impression which the Griselda produced upon the vivid, susceptible imagination of Chaucer, may be judged from his own beautiful version of it in the Canterbury Tales; where the barbarity and improbability of the incidents are So redeemed by the pervading truth and purity and tenderness of the sentiment, that I suppose it

never was perused for the first time without tears. Chaucer, as if proud of his interview with Petrarch, and anxious to publish it, is careful to tell us that he did not derive the story from Boccaccio, but that it was

Learned at Padua of a worthy clerk,

As proved by his wordes and his work ;
Francis Petrark, the Laureat Poete;

which is also proved by internal evidence.

Chaucer so far resembled Petrarch, that, like him, he was at once poet, scholar, courtier, statesman, philosopher, and man of the world; but considered merely as poets, they were the very antipodes of each other. The genius of Dante has been compared to a Gothic cathedral, vast and lofty, and dark and irregular. In the same spirit, Petrarch may be likened to a classical and elegant Greek temple, rising aloft in its fair and faultless proportions, and compacted of the purest Parian marble; while Chaucer is like the far-spreading and picturesque palace of the Alhambra, with its hundred chambers, all variously

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