Like himself, his great work, the Canterbury Tales, lay buried for upward of seventy years in manuscript. Caxton, the first English printer, selected these tales as one of the earliest productions of his press, and thus gave to the world what it will never again consent to lose. Spite of the rude state of the language when he wrote, the splendor of his genius beams and burns gloriously through its inadequate vehicle. Time, which has destroyed his house at Woodstock, and beaten down his castle at Donnington, has not been able to effect the same ruin on his poems. The language has gone on perfecting and polishing; a host of glorious names and glorious works have succeeded Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales, making England affluent in its literary fame as any nation on earth; but, from his distant position, the father of English poetry beams like a star of the first magnitude in the eternal hemisphere of genius. Like Shakspeare, he has, for the most part, seized on narratives already in existence to employ his art upon, but that art is so exquisite that it has stamped immortal value on the narrative. The life and the characters he has represented to us are a portion of the far past, rescued for us from the oblivion that has overwhelmed all that age besides. We gaze on the living and moving scenes with an interest which the progress of time can only deepen. To the latest ages men will read and say, "Thus, in the days of Wickliffe, of John of Gaunt, and Richard II., did men and women look, and act, and think, and feel; thus did a great poet live among them, and send them down to us, and to all posterity, ten thousand times more faithfully preserved than by all the arts of Egypt and the East." Quaint as they are, they are the very quintessence of human nature. They live yet, fresh and vivid, passionate and strong, as they did on their way to the tomb of St. Thomas, upward of five hundred years ago. They can never die; they can never grow old; and amid them the poet, Englishman every inch, lives, and laughs, and quaffs his cup of wine, and tells his story, and chuckles over his jokes, or listens to the narratives of all those around him, with a relish of life that he only could feel or could communicate. There is an elastic geniality in his spirit, a buoyant music in his numbers, a soul of enjoyment in his whole nature, that mark him at once as a man of a thousand; and we feel in the charm that bears us along a strength that will outlast a thousand years. It is like that of the stream that runs, of the wind that blows, of the sun that comes up, ruddy as with youth, from the bright east on an early summer's morning. It is the strength of nature living in its own joyful life, and mingling with the life of all around in gladdening companionship. For a hundred beautiful pictures of genuine English existence and English character; for a world of persons and things that have snatched us from the present to their society; for