Roughly speaking, we may say that Chaucer, the first English writer of sustained imaginative pieces, was also the first English writer for the Press--a writer, that is to say, for the individual reader in his closet rather than a composer of lays, ballads, roundels, or even epics, for recitation. The dictum should be accepted with caution. That it is on the whole just is nevertheless demonstrable by the comparison of the _Canterbury Tales_ or _Troilus and Cresseide_ with say the _Faerie Queene_ or Drayton’s _Polyolbion_. That the work of Chaucer is readable, whereas the epics of Spenser and Drayton practically defy perusal, is not merely a matter of difference of greatness in the respective authors. Chaucer was an infinitely greater writer than either of his successors: his character-drawing is extraordinary, his sense of beauty overwhelming, his minutely observing mind stalls off the possibility of dullness in his pages. And read to himself by an individual reader the work of Spenser is intolerably pompous, allegorical and dull, and that of Drayton all too pedestrian because of his lack of any powers of selection. But, if you will read the longer works of Chaucer aloud you will find him a little difficult to follow simply because of that very minuteness of observation and that very lack of dullness; the others, on the other hand, gain immensely by reading aloud or by recitation--both Spenser and Drayton taking on a sort of jolly robustness that is even to-day by no means disagreeable and that may well have been enormously engrossing in the mouth of a good reader reading to audiences that had little to do but listen and lacked the power of reading for themselves. In the matter of the consumption of literature, in fact, the English world had gone back several generations between the ages of Chaucer and Spenser--if, that is to say, you regard the evolution of the printed book and the arrival of the novel as Progress, for it is quite open to you to regard the disappearance of oral poetry and the epic as retrogression. Nevertheless, it is fairly true to say that Chaucer with Caxton, the first printer, as an intimate wrote far more definitely for the Press than did any of the Elizabethan imaginative writers. Except in the internal style and the outward effect of his work there is of course no evidence that Chaucer considered definitely that the coming of the printing press called for a change in the technique of the imaginative writer--but it would not be utterly fanciful to imagine that he did at least consider himself a writer destined to have a great number of individual readers rather than vast audiences destined to listen to recitals of his work.