9. +Chaucer’s Style.+-- Chaucer expresses, in the truest and liveliest way, “the true and lively of everything which is set before him;” and he first gave to English poetry that force, vigour, life, and colour which raised it above the level of mere rhymed prose. All the best poems and histories in Latin, French, and Italian were well known to Chaucer; and he borrows from them with the greatest freedom. He handles, with masterly power, all the characters and events in his Tales; and he is hence, beyond doubt, the greatest narrative poet that England ever produced. In the Prologue, his masterpiece, Dryden says, “we have our forefathers and great-grand-dames all before us, as they were in Chaucer’s days.” His dramatic power, too, is nearly as great as his narrative power; and Mr Marsh affirms that he was “a dramatist before that which is technically known as the existing drama had been invented.” That is to say, he could set men and women talking as they would and did talk in real life, but with more point, spirit, _verve_, and picturesqueness. As regards the matter of his poems, it may be sufficient to say that Dryden calls him “a perpetual fountain of good sense;” and that Hazlitt makes this remark: “Chaucer was the most practical of all the great poets,-- the most a man of business and of the world. His poetry reads like history.” Tennyson speaks of him thus in his “Dream of Fair Women”:-- “Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath Preluded those melodious bursts that fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth, With sounds that echo still.” 10. JOHN BARBOUR (+1316-1396+).-- The earliest Scottish poet of any importance in the fourteenth century is John Barbour, who rose to be Archdeacon of Aberdeen. Barbour was of Norman blood, and wrote Northern English, or, as it is sometimes called, Scotch. He studied both at Oxford and at the University of Paris. His chief work is a poem called +The Bruce+. The English of this poem does not differ very greatly from the English of Chaucer. Barbour has _fechtand_ for _fighting_; _pressit_ for _pressëd_; _theretill_ for _thereto_; but these differences do not make the reading of his poem very difficult. As a Norman he was proud of the doings of Robert de Bruce, another Norman; and Barbour must often have heard stories of him in his boyhood, as he was only thirteen when Bruce died. CHAPTER III. THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.