would have been just what a plain man would expect. Not only by his inconvenient possession of genius, but also by his great, if fitful industry, and by what we can hardly call by any name but good luck, Chaucer shoots up suddenly between Gower and his natural successors, and thus revolutionises the standard of poetry by which the next century is inevitably judged. The effect of his sudden uprising is almost as confusing to our judgments of his own poetry as of that of his unhappy 'successors.' Brought up, as most of us poor middle-aged critics have been, on textbooks which grudgingly devoted a scanty thirty or forty pages to all that happened ere Surrey and Wyatt began to write an English which literary historians could read without taking any trouble, we inevitably got it into our heads that with Chaucer we were at the very beginning; that he was really, as he was called, the Father of English Poetry, and represented the first blossoming of its spring. The spring had come and was fast fading when Chaucer began to write. It had come with the first blossoming of the romances, and with such lyrics as 'Lenten[1] is come with love to town, With blossoms and with birdes rown';[2] or as 'Blow, northern wind, Send thou me my sweeting'; of which the lightness and spontaneity are represented in only a few snatches in Chaucer. Other touches of the spring he has, for no man better loved the merry month of May, and he has sung it until he has become for ever identified with it in our minds. All the same, he represents also a reaction which sees the humorous side of the lover's springtide longings, and views all things very much as they are, without illusion. Fortunately, in Chaucer's case this prosaic mood was raised and transfigured by the revelation of Italian poetry, which enabled him to give us in _Troilus and Cressida_, and the knight's tale of _Palamon and Arcite_, the most perfect harmony of humour and romance English narrative poetry has produced. No other poet of his time came under the same influences, and to this fact, as well as to his possession of genius, he owes his unique position.