"Chaucer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... may be realized completely. Exquisite order, and universal, with eternal life and light, this is the faith and effort of the schools of Crystal; and you may describe and complete their work quite literally by taking any verses of Chaucer in his tender mood, and observing how he insists on the clearness and brightness first, and then on the order. ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... tasks," says Dr. Glennie, "with alacrity and success. He was playful, good-humored, and beloved by his companions. His reading in history and poetry was far beyond the usual standard of his age, and in my study he found, among other works, a set of our poets—from Chaucer to Churchill—which, I am almost tempted to say, he had more than once perused from beginning to end. He showed at this age an intimate acquaintance with the historical parts of the Holy Scriptures, upon ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... his hand in English literature; and what he brought into England out of the Unknown. In his outwardness, the fabric of his art—we can trace this broad river back to a thinnish stream by the name of Chaucer; or he was growth, recognizably, of the national tree of which Chaucer was the root, or lay at the root. The unity called English poetry had grown naturally from that root to this glorious flower: the sparkle, with, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... hyperbolically called "the mountain of Forth." South and west of the town, towards the estuary of Waterford, lie the baronies of Forth and Bargy, a great part of the population of which, even within our own time, spoke the language Chaucer and Spenser wrote, and retained many of the characteristics of their Saxon, Flemish, and Cambrian ancestors. Through this singular district lay the road towards Duncannon fort, on Waterford harbour, with ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us ever with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer,[33] of Marvell,[34] of Dryden,[35] with the most modern joy,—with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... inland country, which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and narrow paths, as people find a subterranean lake. Thus the British Navy is really national because it is natural; it has cohered out of hundreds of accidental adventures of ships and shipmen before Chaucer's time and after it. But the German Navy is an artificial thing; as artificial as a constructed Alp would be in England. William II. has simply copied the British Navy as Frederick II. copied the French Army: and this Japanese or ant-like assiduity ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... almost as rich as our language. Modern German literature begins in the eighteenth century. Modern English literature began with Chaucer, in the fourteenth century, and has been full of great names and great books ever since. Nothing has been done in German literature for which we have not a counterpart, done as well or better—except the work of Heine, and Heine was a Jew. His opinion of the ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... way which, once found, became comparatively easy to tread. They introduced the sonnet, learnt from Petrarch; Surrey (the same who was executed on the eve of Henry's death) wrote the first English blank verse. The moribund tradition of the successors of Chaucer continued to find better exponents in Scotland than in England, in the persons first of bishop Gawain Douglas—who perhaps should rather be connected with the previous reign—and later of Sir David Lyndsay. But doctrinal ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... struggles was going on another, unobserved at the time. Three languages held sway in England—Latin in the Church, French in polite society, and English among the people. Chaucer's genius selected the language of the people for its expression, as also of course, did Wickliffe in his translation of the Bible. French and Latin were dethroned, and the "King's English" became the language of the literature and speech ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... it could hardly fail to have, unless it belied its model altogether;—but it is as far as possible from giving any notion of the characteristic qualities of "Reinaert de Vos." If Mr. Arnold must change the measure, Chaucer's "Nonnes Preestes Tale" would have been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... other I ever was in. I should not forget some Highland claymores, clustered round a target over the Canterbury people, nor a writing-box of carved wood, lined with crimson velvet, and furnished with silver plate of right venerable aspect, which looked as if it might have been the implement of old Chaucer himself, but which from the arms on the lid must have belonged to some Indian prince of the days of Leo the Magnificent ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... it reaches Piccadilly by a narrow street. At its junction with the former stands an ornamental fountain by Thorneycroft, erected in 1875 at a cost of L5,000, the property of a lady who died intestate and without heirs. At the base are the muses of Tragedy, Comedy, and History in bronze, above Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton in marble, the whole being surmounted by a bronze statue of Fame. The principal mansions in Park Lane are: Brook House, at the north corner of Upper Brook Street, designed by T. H. Wyatt, and the residence ...
— Mayfair, Belgravia, and Bayswater - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... and the greenwood—and the queer miscellany of life there unfolded and ever changing—a kind of gipsy-like longing for the tent and familiar contact with nature and rude human-nature in the open dates from beyond Chaucer, and remains and will have gratification—the longing for novelty and all the accidents, as it were, of pilgrimage and rude social travel. You see it bubble up, like a true and new nature-spring, through all the surface coatings ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... 'balloting-box,' who were made a body corporate, permitted to use a common seal, and to possess goods and lands in mortmain. Kynaston, who styled himself Corporis Armiger, and who had printed in 1635 a translation into Latin verse of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida, was nominated the first regent of the Academy, and published in 1636 its constitution and rules, addressed 'to the noble and generous well-wishers to vertuous actions and learning.' The Academy—'justified and approved by the wisdom of the King's most sacred Majesty ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... possible that the hackish sense of 'flame' is much older than that. The poet Chaucer was also what passed for a wizard hacker in his time; he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, the most advanced computing device of the day. In Chaucer's "Troilus and Cressida", Cressida laments her inability to grasp the proof of a particular mathematical ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... absence of pedantry, of quaintness, and of every species of puerility, very rare among the didactic writers of the age,—the critic proceeds to an enumeration of our principal vernacular poets, or "vulgar makers," as he is pleased to anglicize the words. Beginning with a just tribute to Chaucer, as the father of genuine English verse, he passes rapidly to the latter end of the reign of Henry VIII., when, as he observes, there "sprung up a new company of courtly makers, of whom sir Thomas Wyat the elder and Henry earl of Surry were the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... we now find only in remoter authours, were in his time accessible and familliar. The fable of "As You Like It", which is supposed to be copied from Chaucer's Gamelyn, was a little pamphlet of those times; and old Mr. Cibber remembered the tale of Hamlet in plain English prose, which the criticks have now ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... One may meet man after man, old pupils of his, who have gone on into the homely drudging rounds of business, the law, journalism—men whose faces will light up with affection and remembrance when Doctor Gummere's name is mentioned. We may have forgotten much of our Chaucer, our Milton, our Ballads—though I am sure we have none of us forgotten the deep and thrilling ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... Book, which also is not very successful! Between that day and this, I say, there has been a pretty space of time; a pretty spell of work, which somebody has done! Thinkest thou there were no poets till Dan Chaucer? No heart burning with a thought, which it could not hold, and had no word for; and needed to shape and coin a word for,—what thou callest a metaphor, trope, or the like? For every word we have, there was such a man and poet. ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... The lights of learning on the wings of trade; Bologna's student walls arise to fame, Germania, thine their rival honors claim; Halle, Gottinge, Upsal, Kiel and Leyden smile, Oxonia, Cambridge cheer Britannia's isle; Where, like her lark, gay Chaucer leads the lay, The matin carol ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... writings, for instance, like the long list of trees described (and in the most interesting way) in the first canto of the First Book of the "Faerie Queene," and indeed he is curiously distinct from all his contemporaries. Chaucer, before him, spoke much of flowers and plants, and drew them as from the life. In the century after him Herrick may be named as another who sung of flowers as he saw them; but the real contemporaries of Shakespeare are, with few exceptions,[3:1] ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... Temple.—I am happy to see that your correspondent, Mr. Thoms, is about to illustrate some of the obscurities of Chaucer. Perhaps he or some of your learned contributors may be able to remove a doubt that has arisen in my mind relative to the poet's well-known description of the Manciple in his Prologue ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... a flat of thought, sometimes for a hundred lines together, but it is when he has got into a track of Scripture. His antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity; for therein he imitated Spenser, as Spencer did Chaucer. And though, perhaps, the love of their masters may have transported both too far in the frequent use of them, yet in my opinion obsolete words may then be laudably revived when either they are more sounding or more significant than those in practice, and when ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... Spencer to Americans. Without an effort we rejoice in Hawthorne and Mark Twain, Henry James and Howells, as Americans can in Dickens and Thackeray, Meredith and Thomas Hardy. And, more than all, Americans own with ourselves all literature in the English tongue before the Mayflower sailed; Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, Raleigh, Ben Jonson, and the authors of the English Bible Version are their spiritual ancestors as much as ever they are ours. The tie of language is all-powerful—for language is the food formative of minds. A volume could be written on the ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... gayest society, the expensive pleasures of which made great inroads upon his moderate wealth. Like other Romans, he looked to a career in the provinces for means of improving his fortune, but was disappointed, and like our own Chaucer, but more frequently, he pours forth lamentations to his empty purse. He was evidently a friend of most of the prominent men of letters of his time, and he entered freely into the debauchery of the period. Thus his verse gives a representation of the debased manners of the ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... But the high comedy of the scene between Livia and the Widow is as fine as the best work in that kind left us by the best poets and humorists of the Shakespearean age; it is not indeed unworthy of the comparison with Chaucer's which it suggested to the all but ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... reading aloud Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" when they were announced, but she quickly laid aside the heavy tome, and the Duchess paused in her embroidery and greeted ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... much hated as fashionable life." He, however, gave way, the two women followed suit, as he had intended they should, and Wales was decided upon. For Borrow the literature of Wales had always exercised a great attraction. Her bards were as no other bards. Ab Gwilym was to him the superior of Chaucer, and Huw Morris "the greatest songster of the seventeenth century." It was, he confessed, a desire to put to practical use his knowledge of the Welsh tongue, "such as it was," that first gave him the ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales the city was surrounded by a strong wall with twenty-one towers and six gates. Of the wall there are some remains in Broad Street; of the gates "West Gate," through which the pilgrims entered from ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... Shafton, himself hesitating and blushing; for, to the grace of Queen Bess's age be it spoken, her courtiers wore more iron on their breasts than brass on their foreheads, and even amid their vanities preserved still the decaying spirit of chivalry, which inspired of yore the very gentle Knight of Chaucer, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... a book of poems that will bring you into fame, Let me send a sample packet that will guarantee the same, Holding "Seeds of Thought from Byron, Herrick, Chaucer, Tennyson." Plant 'em deep, and keep 'em watered, and you'll find the deed ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... up in a country thickly settled with men whose ancestors came along with his from across the water. Till a century ago the barony of Forth retained a dialect of its own which was in effect such English as men spoke before Chaucer began to write; and even to-day in any Wexford fair or market you will see among the strong, well-nourished, prosperous farmers many faces and figures which an artist might easily assimilate to an athletic example of the traditional John ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... by simple hint. Lowell notes a happy instance of this sort of picturing by intimation when he says of Chaucer: "Sometimes he describes amply by the merest hint, as where the Friar, before setting himself down, drives away the cat. We know without need of more words that he has chosen ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... remarks on the scenery of Charlemont, Lady, Lord Byron's admiration of ——, Mrs. Charles the Fifth Charlotte, the Princess, attacks upon Lord Byron in consequence of his verses to Death of Chatham, Lord, a notice of His oratory Chatterton, Thomas, self-educated Never vulgar Chaucer, Geoffrey, character of his poetry Chauncy, Captain Chaworth, Mary Anne (afterwards Mrs. Musters), Lord Byron's early attachment to His last farewell of her Her marriage Interview with, after her marriage Cheltenham, Lord Byron at Childe Alarique 'CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE,' the poem commenced ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... barren and unenclosed, which was known by the name of Hallamshire. Iron abounded there; and, from a very early period, the rude whittles fabricated there had been sold all over the kingdom. They had indeed been mentioned by Geoffrey Chaucer in one of his Canterbury Tales. But the manufacture appears to have made little progress during the three centuries which followed his time. This languor may perhaps be explained by the fact that the trade was, during almost the whole ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of odd phrases, hear this. A young Italian friend of mine, fresh from Sicily as his own oranges, a well-educated, talented person, who has labored hard to get familiar with English letters, and has read our authors, from CHAUCER downward, dilated thus on the poets: 'PO-PE is very mosh like HORACE; I like him very mosh; but I tink BIR-RON was very sorry poet.' 'What!' quoth I, 'BYRON a sorry poet! I thought he was a favorite with Italians?' 'Oh, yes; I adore him very mosh; I almost do admire him; but he was very sorry ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... may have been insignificant ones, in building up their country's literature. Of the great writers, Professor Craik devotes but little space to Shakspeare and Milton, because their works are in everybody's hands; while from Chaucer and Spenser, Swift and Burke, ample specimens are given, the author assuming that their writings are but little read. Indeed, he declares that the great poets and other writers even of the last generation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... feather bed which it had struck her was too good for that "shiftless coot," Cousin Phoebe's husband, to lie upon, and, bidding her bring her witnesses on the morrow, bustled the will into his safe and fell upon his papers after the manner of all lawyer kind since Chaucer's sergeant of the law who "semed ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... corner in the SW. transept of Westminster Abbey, so called as containing the tombs of Chaucer, Spenser, and other eminent ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... in the pleasant manner of Chaucer; in which the Poet imitates that venerable old Bard, in the obsolete Language of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... though his range of words is limited and his sentences are crude and halting, A grown man, having acquired the trick of language, may talk fluently and say nothing. In our endeavor to understand a work of art, a poem by Chaucer or by Tennyson, a picture by Greco or by Manet, a prelude by Bach or a symphony by Brahms, we may ask, Of that which the artist wanted to say, how much could he say with the means at his disposal? ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... the development, the product of those very different indispensable qualities of poetry, in the presence [8] of which the English is equal or superior to all other modern literature—the native, sublime, and beautiful, but often wild and irregular, imaginative power in English poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare, with which Professor Minto deals, in his Characteristics of English Poets (Blackwood), lately reprinted. That his book should have found many readers we can well understand, in the light of the excellent qualities which, in high degree, ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... this essay must be left to explain themselves. It could not have been written at all without the aid of the Publications of the Chaucer Society, and more especially of the labours of the Society's Director, Mr. Furnivall. To other recent writers on Chaucer—including Mr Fleay, from whom I never differ but with hesitation—I have referred, in so far as it was in my power to do so. Perhaps I may take this opportunity of expressing ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... cases our East Anglian dialect is merely a survival of old English, as when we say 'axe' for 'ask.' We find in Chaucer: ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... books. He was born in London, near the great centres of the intellectual movements of his time; he travelled much, especially in Italy and France; he read widely in the literatures and philosophies of many ages and many lands; and so grew into the cosmopolitanism of spirit that belonged to Chaucer and ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... by abstinence that they will be cured of their hankering after unwholesome sweets. What they do dislike and despise and are ashamed of is poverty. To ask them to fight for the difference between the Christmas number of the Illustrated London News and the Kelmscott Chaucer is silly: they prefer the News. The difference between a stockbroker's cheap and dirty starched white shirt and collar and the comparatively costly and carefully dyed blue shirt of William Morris is a difference so disgraceful to ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... these works was afterwards exhibited at that melancholy monument to past exhibitions, the Colosseum in the Regent's Park. He was employed by Charles Knight in the illustrations to his "Shakespeare," "London," "Old England," "Chaucer," and the now forgotten "Penny Magazine," for all of which publications he executed ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... perseverance, to "come to the test in the metrification" of the Divine Comedy. Some twenty-seven lines, "the sole example in English literature of that period, of the use of terza rima, obviously copied from Dante" (Complete Works of Chaucer, by the Rev. W. Skeat, 1894, i. 76, 261), are imbedded in Chaucer's Compleint to his Lady. In the sixteenth century Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey ("Description of the restless state of a lover"), "as novises newly sprung out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch" (Puttenham's Art ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... time did many a noble dede, And for their worthines full oft have bore The crown of laurer leaves on the hede, As ye may in your olde bookes rede: And how that he that was a conquerour Had by laurer alway his most honour. DAN CHAUCER: The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... notice that he did not go, like Emerson, to the great fountain-heads of poetry,—to Homer or Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe,—but courted the muse rather among such tributaries as Virgil, Moliere, Chaucer, Keats, and Lessing. It may have been better for him that he began in this manner; but a remark that Scudder attributes to him in regard to Lessing gives us an insight into the deeper mechanism of his mind. "Shelley's poetry," he said, ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... was an almost universal accomplishment, and we learn from Chaucer, in whose poetry much can be learned of the music of his time, that country-squires could sing and play the lute, and even "songes make and well indite." From the same source it appears that then, as now, one of the favorite accomplishments of a young lady was to sing well, and that her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... now find only in remoter authors, were in his time accessible and familiar. The fable of As you like it, which is supposed to be copied from Chaucer's Gamelyn, was a little pamphlet of those times; and old Mr. Cibber remembered the tale of Hamlet in plain English prose, which the criticks have now to seek ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... Coulanges, I fear, will never stand alone. L'Absent, The Absentee,—it is impossible that a Parisian can make any sense of it from beginning to end. But these things teach authors what is merely local and temporary. Les deux Griseldis de Chaucer et Edgeworth; and, to crown all, two works surreptitiously printed in England under our name, and which are no better than they ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... has cast over the English poets is as powerful, in its way, as was the influence of Italian literature upon the early literature of England. From Chaucer down, the poets have turned to Italy for inspiration, and, what is still better, have found it. It is not too much to say that the "Canterbury Tales" could not have existed, in their present form, if Boccaccio had not written the "Decameron;" and it is to Boccaccio ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... Having inspired Ovid and Vergil, and been recognized by Lucretius, it passed as a literary legacy to Boethius, Dante, and Jean de Meung; it was incorporated by Frezzi in his strange allegorical composition the Quadriregio, and was thrice handled by Chaucer; it was dealt with humorously by Cervantes in Don Quixote, and became the prey of the satirist in the hands of Juvenal, Bertini, and Hall. The association of this ideal world with the simplicity of pastoral life was ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... author of several amusing and interesting works, such as "Tavern Anecdotes," "Fifty Years' Recollections of an Old Bookseller." &c., now scarce, though "West's Warwickshire" may often be met with at the "Chaucer's Head," and other ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... Odysseys. He'd croon like one possessed the magic strain Of heroes tossed along the unvintaged main, And, crutch aloft in air, would fondly beat Time to the rushing of the poet's feet. Poetry was all his solace: those bright dames That old Dan Chaucer in his rapture names, And those in Villon's pages that appear As dazzling-white as snows of yester-year, Trooped past his eye in long procession fair. O, Sovereign Virgin, what a crowd was there! Helen, alas! with Paris by her side, On ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... the Great translated this work into Anglo-Saxon; Chaucer, Queen Elizabeth, and Lord ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... Jane Beaufort, grand-daughter of John of Gaunt, son of Edward III. The story of their wooing (of course in the allegorical manner of the age, and with poetical conventions in place of actual details) is told in James's poem, "The King's Quair," a beautiful composition in the school of Chaucer, of which literary scepticism has vainly tried to rob the royal author. James was the ablest and not the most scrupulous of the Stuarts. His captivity had given him an English education, a belief in order, and in English parliamentary methods, and a fiery determination ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... Unless Chaucer had intended to mark with particular exactness the day of the journey to Canterbury, he would not have taken such unusual precautions to protect his text from ignorant or careless transcribers. We find him not only recording the altitudes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... gathered manye humours in sondry places, which drawing to ripenesse enclosed them selues in slymes and in filmes, as in the maresses of Egipt, and other stondynge waters we often se happen. And seynge the heate of thaier sokynly warmeth the cold ground and heate meint [Footnote: Mingled.—A word of Chaucer's time. "And in one vessel both together meint." Fletcher's Purple Island, iv., st. 21.] with moisture is apt to engendre: it came to passe by the gentle moisture of the night aire, and the comforting heate of the daie sonne, that those humours so riped, drawyng vp to the rinde of thearth, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... Divine Son to her all but celestial arms—the Son of God fainting beneath a load of woe, not his own. Old Poetry! Glorious old Homer, with his magic song; and sturdy, oak-like in his strength, as in his verdure, old Chaucer. Old Music! Hail, ye inspired sons of the lyre! A noble host are ye, enshrined in the hearts of all loyal worshippers of the tuneful god. And yet (we grieve to confess it) we, even we, spite of all our enthusiasm, have been seen laughing at "old music," the aspiring psalmody of a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... in the kitchen if you never talk to the servants. This is true, and to arrive at Bodo's thoughts and feelings and holiday amusements we must bid goodbye to Abbot Irminon's estate book, and peer into some very dark corners indeed; for though by the aid of Chaucer and Langland and a few Court Rolls it is possible to know a great deal about the feelings of a peasant six centuries later, material is scarce in the ninth century, and it is all the more necessary to remember the secret ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... domain. As long as you run across Englishmen born this side of three hundred years ago, you are all right; but the minute you get back of Elizabeth's time the language begins to fog up, and the further back you go the foggier it gets. I had some talk with one Langland and a man by the name of Chaucer—old-time poets—but it was no use, I couldn't quite understand them, and they couldn't quite understand me. I have had letters from them since, but it is such broken English I can't make it out. ...
— Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven • Mark Twain
... of reconciling George to his grandfather? George was the representative of the family,—of a family so old that no one now knew which had first taken the ancient titular name of some old Saxon landowner,—the parish, or the man. There had been in old days some worthy Vavaseurs, as Chaucer calls them, whose rank and bearing had been adopted on the moorland side. Of these things Alice thought much, and felt that it should be her duty so to act, that future Vavasors might at any rate not be less in the world than they who had passed away. In a few ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... pink of clerkly portraiture, seemed but a fair prototype of this individual, Geoffrey Chaucer at this time being a setter forth of rhymes and other matters for the ticklish ears of sundry well-fed and frolicksome idlers about the court of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... stubble, sweet clover, and grey swedes, with Ogwen making music far below. The sun is up at last, and Colonel Pennant's grim slate castle, towering above black woods, glitters metallic in its rays, like Chaucer's house of fame. He stops, to look back once. Far up the vale, eight miles away, beneath a roof of cloud, the pass of Nant Francon gapes high in air between the great jaws of the Carnedd and the Glyder, its cliffs marked with the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... scaelan or scylan, and is found as a principal verb in that language, as well as in ours. In the church homily they say, "To Him alone we schall us to devote ourselves;" we bind or obligate ourselves. Chaucer, an ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... which this kind of worship is known, is of Portuguese origin; it is derived from feitico, "made," "artificial" (compare the old English fetys, used by Chaucer); and this term, used of the charms and amulets worn in the Roman Catholic religion of the period, was applied by the Portuguese sailors of the eighteenth century to the deities they saw worshipped by the negroes of the West Coast of Africa. De Brosses, a French savant ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... the other hand, is one who leaves the things of which he makes record to produce their own impression, the writer himself remaining an almost impassive spectator, telling the story with little or no comment. Chaucer, in the prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," betrays his personal feeling for his characters continually, and so is subjective. Shakespeare in his plays is objective, presenting all sorts of men and women without show of his ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... Geoffrey Chaucer, born about 1340, was the first great English poet. The immense popularity of the Canterbury Tales is shown by the number of manuscript copies still in existence. It was one of the first books ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... tasted through the year, But white and black was all her homely cheer, Brown bread and milk (but first she skimmed her bowls), And rasher of singed bacon on the coals. CHAUCER. ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... in Dryden, and its application to the Order of the Garter, seem to have escaped the notice of the several correspondents who have addressed you on the subject. I quote from The Flower and the Leaf, Dryden's version of one of Chaucer's tales: ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... of spelling by the eye instead of the ear. Advocated with more heat than light by the outmates of every asylum for the insane. They have had to concede a few things since the time of Chaucer, but are none the less hot in defence of those ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... ear of Queen Philippa, and loved too well gay society, luxurious feasts, and dainty attire, not to shrink with disgust from thought of the dirty, uncouth, and miserable herd of "greasy caps." Gower was inditing fashionable love-songs. Chaucer, who years after was to direct such telling blows in his Canterbury Tales at the vices and corruptness of the clergy, was a favorite member of the retinue of the powerful "John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster," and had as yet only written long and stately poems on the history of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... in the latter part of the fourteenth century, was "the first of our authors who can be properly said to have written English." Contemporary with Gower, the father of English poetry, was the still greater poet, his disciple Chaucer; who embraced many of the tenets of Wickliffe, and imbibed something of the spirit of the reformation, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the origin of Satin, hesitates between Satalin from Satalia in Asia Minor and Soudanin from the Soudan or Sultan; neither half so probable as Zaituni. I may add that in a French list of charges of 1352 we find the intermediate form Zatony. Satin in the modern form occurs in Chaucer:— ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the heavens, or scheme of the world, at the point of the sun's entrance into Aries. I dispute not here the truth or lawfulness of that art; but it is usual with poets, especially the Italians, to mix astrology in their poems. Chaucer, amongst us, is frequent in it: but this revolution particularly I have taken out of Luigi Pulci; and there is one almost the same in Boiardo's "Orlando Inamorato." Now, if these poets knew, that a star were to appear at our king's birth, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... to be taken off, it did not fail to be so called: it remains, however, just murder. Botticelli, not shirking the position at all, judged murder to be a natural fact, and its spirit or essence swiftness and stealth. Chaucer, let us note, had ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... every stranger. As Natalie roamed over this vast structure, in itself a world of curiosity, like so many small churches roofed in by one great canopy, she lingered in the south transept, in what is called the Poet's Corner. Here are the tombs of many of the most famous poets of England. Chaucer, Edmund Spencer, Francis Beaumont, and others, have tablets here erected to their memory, while in other chapels are monuments erected in memory of sovereigns, who have long since gone to render an account of their ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... night-school through the winter, no matter how sharply the wind blew off Lake Michigan, in addition to her daily duties at the High School, where for ten years she had imparted instruction in the "English branches," translating Chaucer into the modern dialect of Sparta, Illinois, for the benefit of Miss Elfrida Bell, among others. It had sent her on this occasion to see Mrs. Leslie Bell, and Miss Kimpsey could remember circumstances under which she had obeyed her ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... was of great disport, And full pleasant and amiable of port; Of small hounds had she that she fed With roasted flesh and milk and wastel bread.—CHAUCER. ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... own. Then, to take a peep in by the way at the butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique hospitality: the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen fire-places, cordial recesses; ovens whose first pies were baked four centuries ago; and spits which have cooked for Chaucer! Not the meanest minister among the dishes but is hallowed to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... sun in the summer season at Washington, softer at times than any old Dan Chaucer ever knew; but again so ardent that anyone who would ride abroad would best do so in the early morning. This is true today, and it was true when the capital city lay in the heart of a sweeping forest at the edge of a ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... "mother." The familiar "mother" of the New England farmer of the "Old Homestead" type, presents, perhaps, a relic of the same thought. The word dame, in older English, from being a title of respect for women—there is a close analogy in the history of sire—came to signify "mother." Chaucer translates the French of the Romaunt of the Rose, "Enfant qui craint ni pere ni mere Ne pent que bien ne le comperre," by "For who that dredeth sire ne dame Shall it abie in bodie or name," and Shakespeare makes poor Caliban declare: ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... married to Lot, king of Orkney, who was by Arthur made king of Norway. Sir Gawain was one of the most famous knights of the Round Table, and is characterized by the romancers as the SAGE and COURTEOUS Gawain. To this Chaucer alludes in his "Squiere's Tale," where the strange knight ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... hint would have sufficed to throw the youth of the sixties into a delirium of amorous excitement. It is all very estimable, no doubt. But still"—Mr. Scogan sighed.—"I for one should like to see, mingled with this scientific ardour, a little more of the jovial spirit of Rabelais and Chaucer." ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... in our literary sky, that burn with undimmed lustre even beside that great morning star that rose above the horizon of the Middle Ages. Historians we have, with all of Chaucer's truthfulness and luxuriance of expression, and poets with his fresh tendernesses, his flashing thoughts, and exquisite simplicity of heart. And perhaps, if we inquire for the distinguishing features ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... him, which she hath not done these many months I think. By and by in comes Sir J. Minnes and Sir W. Batten, and so we sat talking. Among other things, Sir J. Minnes brought many fine expressions of Chaucer, which he doats on mightily, and without doubt he is ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... champions of the ubiquitous poet in recent realistic verse may point to the Canterbury Tales, and show us Chaucer ambling along with the other pilgrims. His presence, they remind us, instead of distorting his picture of fourteenth-century life, lends intimacy to our view of it. We can only feebly retort that, despite his girth, the poet ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... chief castles of Kent. It was here that Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, diplomatist, poet, and lover of Anne Boleyn, who with the gallant and ill-fated Surrey "preluded", in a more exact sense than it could be said of Chaucer, "those melodious bursts that fill the spacious times of great Elizabeth", was able to proclaim, in an epistle ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... any more, and summoning their courage they must steer out into the Bay of Biscay. This way went John of Gaunt to St. James in 1386, to be crowned King of Castile in the great Romanesque cathedral; and so, too, Chaucer must have pictured the Wyf of Bath ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... ballad, or from what rich frame Did you descend to glorify the earth? Was it from Chaucer's singing book you came? Or did Watteau's small brushes ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... library of St Mark's at Venice. Subsequently electrum (an alloy of gold and silver) disappeared as a specific metal, and tin was ascribed to Jupiter instead, the sign of mercury becoming common to the metal and the planet. Thus we read in Chaucer (Chanouns Yemannes ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Lydgate's—see l. 366, p. 36-7—and contains, besides, the usual directions how to dress, how to behave in church, at meals, and when serving at table, a wise man's advice on the books his little Jack should read, the best English poets,—then Gower, Chaucer, Occleve, and Lydgate,—not the Catechism and Latin Grammar. It was very pleasant to come off the directions not to conveye spetell over the table, or burnish one's bones with one's teeth, to the burst of enthusiasm with which the writer ...
— Caxton's Book of Curtesye • Frederick J. Furnivall
... sixteenth century. The cathedral of Cologne is the offspring of forgotten brains. Such men as Anselm were educated on the Trivium and Quadrivium. Five hundred years ago Merton College could show such men as Geoffrey Chaucer, William of Occam, and John Wickliffe. If the history of science can produce four brighter contemporary names than Napier, Kepler, Descartes, and Galileo, let them be forthcoming. But when, still earlier by a century and a half, we behold a man who ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... Geffrey Chaucer, in his argument to The Assemblie of Foules, relates that, "All foules are gathered before Nature on St. Valentine's day, to chose their makes. A formell egle beyng beloved of three tercels, requireth a yeeres respite to make her choise: upon this triall, Qui bien aime tard oublie-'He ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... are the pages of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare with the Eglantine! This delicious plant, known here as SWEETBRIAR (R. rubIginosa), emits its very aromatic odor from russet glands on the under, downy side of the small leaflets, always a certain means of identification. From eastern Canada to Virginia ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... Campanella Carew Cassiodorus Catullus Celtes Chambers Charlemagne Chateaubriand Chaucer Chlodwig Chlotaire Chrysostom Cicero Claudius Clement of Rome v. Clugny, Abbe M. Colonna, Vittoria Columbus Columella Corneille Cornelia Correggio Cowley ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... mixed up among history and literature, can't always remember which is real and which is make-up. It's a fact. I put down Portia as history in my exercise yesterday, and said the story of the Spanish Armada was told by Chaucer. Now you're laughing, and you look more like Ulyth Stanton. Sit down on this bed. There! Open your mouth and shut your eyes, and see what the king ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... sculptor Powers, Swedenborgian and spiritualist (a simple and genial man, "with eyes like a wild Indian's, so black and full of light"), and Hillard, the American lawyer, who, in his Six months in Italy, described Browning's conversation as "like the poetry of Chaucer," meaning perhaps that it was hearty, fresh, and vigorous, "or like his own poetry simplified and made transparent." "It seems impossible," Hillard goes on, "to think that he can ever grow old." And of Mrs Browning: "I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... From Chaucer's character of the Temple Manciple, it would appear that the great preferment which advocates in this time chiefly aspired to, was to become steward to some great man: ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... not long ago specially recommended the less known American poets, but he probably assumed that every one would have read Shakespeare, Milton (Paradise Lost, Lycidas, Comus and minor poems), Chaucer, Dante, Spencer, Dryden, Scott, Wordsworth, Pope, Byron, and others, before embarking on ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... A. In Chaucer we find allusions made to imageries, pinnacles, tabernacles, (canopied niches for statuary,) and corbelles. Lydgate, in The Siege of Troy, in his description of the buildings, adverts to those of his own age, and uses several architectural terms now obsolete or ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... vigour, with humorous originality. Though he had in his possession scarce a dozen volumes, Alexander was really a bookish man and something of a scholar; his quotations, which were frequent, ranged from Homer to Horace, from Chaucer to Tennyson. He recited a few of his own poetical compositions, and they might have been worse; Piers made him glow and sparkle ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... medicine persist. In Chaucer's day, the fourteenth century, violent and poisonous drugs were used, but luckily they were often administered to a little dummy which the doctor carried about with him. As we read each day in our newspapers of the various nostrums advertised as curing every mortal ill, we may well ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... of the Gesta Romanorum is most conspicuously to be traced in the work of Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate; but it has served as a source of inspiration to the flagging ingenuity of each succeeding generation. It would be tedious to enter on an enumeration of the various indebtednesses of English literature to these early tales. A few instances ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... ceiling was the same! The power of the good fairy had not reached to the transformation of that! But the walls! Instead of the great hole in the plaster close by the bed, his eyes fell on a piece of rich old tapestry! Curtains of silk damask, all bespotted with quaintest flowers, each like a page of Chaucer's poetry, hung round his bed, quite other than fit sails for the Stygian boat. They had made the bed as different as the vine in summer from the vine in winter. A quilt of red satin lay in the place of the patchwork coverlid. Everything had been changed. He ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... whether Pope is the organ or the bell—the nightingale or the cuckoo; we suppose that Mr. Hunt knows that Pope was called by his contemporaries the nightingale, but we never heard Milton and Dryden called cuckoos; or, if the comparison is to be taken the other way, we apprehend that, though Chaucer may be to Mr. Hunt's ears a church organ, Pope cannot, to any ear, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... hard, Frank; of course I'll think over what you say. But really Queensberry ought to be in a madhouse. He's too absurd," and in that spirit he left me, outwardly self-confident. He might have remembered Chaucer's words: ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... to turn to the corresponding stanzas in Chaucer. The invocation to the Virgin with which he commences the story of St. Cecilia is rendered almost word for ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... genius than Petrarch, was his contemporary. About the same time Boccaccio in his Decamerone gave at once to Italian prose that purity and grace, which none of his successors in the career of literature have ever been able to excel. And in our own island Chaucer with a daring hand redeemed his native tongue from the disuse and ignominy into which it had fallen, and poured out the immortal strains that the genuine lovers of the English tongue have ever since ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... of what our own English language and literature owe to the sixteenth century seems superfluous. The popular writings of Chaucer in the fourteenth century were historically important, but the presence of very many archaic words makes them now difficult to read. But in England, from the appearance in 1551 of the English version of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, [Footnote: Originally published in Latin in 1516.] a representation ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... Catho, printed by Caxton, n.d. 4to. Chaucer, in his Miller's Tale (Chaucer's Works, ed. Bell, i. 194), describes the old carpenter of Oxford, who had married a young girl, as having neglected to study [Magnus] Catho, which prescribed that marriages ought to take place ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... his shrine at Canterbury; and the line of road taken by them can still be traced, though only portions of it are now used as a highway. The direction, however, in which it runs makes it clear (as S.H., no doubt, is aware) that it cannot be Chaucer's road. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... flower-lulled in sleepy grass, Hear the cool lapse of hours pass, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester . . . Still in the dawnlit waters cool His ghostly Lordship swims his pool, And tries the strokes, essays the tricks, Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx; Dan Chaucer hears his river still Chatter beneath a phantom mill; Tennyson notes, with studious eye, How Cambridge waters hurry by . . . And in that garden, black and white Creep whispers through the grass all night; And spectral dance, before the dawn, A hundred Vicars down the lawn; Curates, ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various |
