The Herculean labour of CHAUCER was the creation of a new style. In this he was as fortunate as he was likewise unhappy. He mingled with the native rudeness of our English words of Provençal fancy, and some of French and of Latin growth. He banished the superannuated and the uncouth, and softened the churlish nature of our hard Anglo-Saxon; but the poet had nearly endangered the novel diction when his artificial pedantry assumed what he called "the ornate style" in "the Romaunt of the Rose," and in his "Troilus and Cressida." This "ornate style" introduced sesquipedalian Latinisms, words of immense dimensions, that could not hide their vacuity of thought. Chaucer seems deserted by his genius when "the ornate style" betrays his pangs and his anxiety. As the error of a fine genius becomes the error of many, because monstrous protuberances may be copied, while the softened lines of beauty remain inimitable, this "ornate style" corrupted inferior writers, who, losing all relish of the natural feeling and graceful simplicity of their master, filled their verse with noise and nonsense. This vicious style, a century afterwards, was resumed by STEPHEN HAWES. We have, however, a glorious evidence, amid this struggle both with a new and with a false style, of Chaucer's native good taste; he finally wholly abandoned this artificial diction; and his later productions, no longer disfigured by such tortured phrases and such remote words, awaken our sympathy in the familiar language of life and passion. TYRWHIT has ingeniously constructed a metrical system to arrange the versification to the ear of a modern reader; by this contrivance he would have removed all obstructions in the pronunciation and in the syllabic quantities. He maintained that the lines were regular decasyllabics. But who can read this poet for any length, even the "Canterbury Tales" in the elaborated text of Tyrwhit, without being reminded of its fallacy? Even the E final, on which our critic has laid such stress, though often sounded, assuredly is sometimes mute. Dan Chaucer makes at his pleasure words long or short, and dyssyllabic or trisyllabic; and this he has himself told us-- But for the rime is light and lewde, Yet make it somewhat agreáble, Though some verse fail in a sylláble. Our critic was often puzzled by his own ingenuity, for in some inveterate cases he has thrown out in despair an observation, that "a reader who cannot perform such operations for himself (that is, helping out the metre) had better not trouble his head about the versification of our ancient authors." The verse of Chaucer seems more carefully regulated in his later work, "the Tales;" but it is evident that Chaucer trusted his cadences to his ear, and his verse is therefore usually rhythmical, and accidentally metrical.