"Chaucer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his hert Was hurt vnwarly by castyng of an eye On fair fresh the lusty yong Emelye And al the stryf bytwene hym & his brother And how that one faug[h]t wit[h] that other Wit[h]yn the groue, til they by Theseus Accorded were as Chaucer tellet[h] vs And furthermore as I gan beholde I sawe hou phebus wit[h] an arowe of golde Y wounded was thurg[h] ...
— The Temple of Glass • John Lydgate
... bordure. The whole of the proceedings in this remarkable case are preserved, and have been published; and they derive a peculiar interest from the circumstance, that amongst the witnesses who gave evidence was the father of English Poetry, GEOFFREY CHAUCER. Appeal having been made to the Sovereign, RICHARDII. determined that a "plain bordure argent" was a Mark of Cadency, good and right, and perfectly sufficient as a Difference "between Cousin and Cousin in blood"; but that it ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... 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 will ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... want 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 ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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 besier ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... of history which had been told before. James is in an awful stew, and I cannot blame him; but then he should consider the hyoscyamus which I was taking, and the anxious botheration about the money-market. However, as Chaucer says:— ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... only one more," muttered Cope, looking at the pile of sheets under the gas-globe, "I should probably learn that Chaucer ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... of all the Muse-possest, That, down from Chaucer's days to Dryden's times Have spent their noble ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Newton. The little watch tower where he pierced the heavens with his telescope is still standing. One ascends it, and surveys the firmament, not without a reverential feeling. Cambridge abounds with the associations of genius. Chaucer studied here, and at Oxford also, it is said; and in treading the great court of Trinity, one cannot help thinking of Bacon. Milton's mulberry tree is yet standing, and puts forth a few fresh leaves every spring in the garden of Christ's College. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... most beautiful and well-proportioned composition was the famous rose-window, forty feet in diameter, referred to as a familiar object by Chaucer. ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... modern languages is unknown, but he has certainly introduced many French scenes in his works, and he has taken several of his plots, such as that of Romeo and Juliet, from the Italians. As to his own language, he is said to have made the poems of Chaucer principally his study, so that it would not be quite fair to produce any plagiarisms from that writer; but I give the reader a few specimens of English literature taken from other quarters, which seem to have afforded Shakspeare ideas, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... probably often been remarked as somewhat curious, that Chaucer, in describing the arrival of Palamon and Arcite at Athens, mentions the day of the week on ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... beddes hed she made a mew And covered it with velouettes blew, In signe of trouth, that is in woman sene." Chaucer, Squiere's Tale. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 66, February 1, 1851 • Various
... 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 ...
— Mayfair, Belgravia, and Bayswater - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... and Dee and Bale themselves. Others who did good work were Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel; Lord William Howard; Long Harry Savile of Bank; Laurence Nowell, who rescued Anglo-Saxon books; Nicholas Brigam, who was interested in English literature and built Chaucer's tomb in the Abbey; the Theyers of Brockworth, near Gloucester. These are names to some of which we shall return; it would be well at this moment to take a few libraries one by one and see what can be ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... as to the derivation. We can say with certainty that these nine plays were made out of stories from Boccaccio, Masuccio, Bandello, Ser Giovanni, Straparola, Cinthio or Belleforest; that those six were based on older plays, and another half-dozen drawn from Holinshed; that Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Sidney, Greene, and Lodge provided other plots; and so forth, until we are left with The Tempest, founded in part on an actual contemporary event, Love's Labour's Lost, apparently his only original plot—if indeed it deserve the name—and ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... the times of the Mortimer badge, was built of creamy stone, and had an archway conducting the traveller into a courtyard worthy of Chaucer, with ranges of galleries running round it, the balustrades of dark carved oak suiting with the timbers of the latticed window and gables, and with the noble outside stair at one angle, by which they communicated with one another. To these beauties the good Major was entirely insensible. He only ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Geoffrey Baker in his Chronicle (which, written in his own hand, after six hundred years yet remains in the Bodleian at Oxford) tells us that none fell till they were afraid of it. Still more curiously, Chaucer, Langland, and Wycliff, who all witnessed it, hardly mention it at all. There could not be any more eloquent tribute to the nameless horror that it caused than this hushed silence on the part of three of England's ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... the ancientist langeges on record,” and whose touching preference of a gipsy tent to a roof, “on the accent of health, sweetness of the air, and for enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life,” is expressed with a poetical feeling such as Chaucer might have known had he not, as a court poet, been too genteel. “Enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life!” That is what Borrow did; and how few ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... on the ground, which is my modres gate, I knocke with my staf; erlich and late, And say to hire, Leve mother, let me in." CHAUCER, The ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... time-honored abuses. He prohibited the use of Latin in public acts. He adopted the native tongue in all his own works, and thus gave to Spanish an honorable eminence, while French and German struggled long for a learning from scholars, and English was to wait a hundred years for the advent of Dan Chaucer. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... clubs, the object of which is knowledge and the broadening of the intellectual horizon. Science, languages, literature, are their daily food. They can speak in tongues; they can talk about the solar spectrum; they can interpret Chaucer, criticise Shakespeare, understand Browning. There is no literature, ancient or modern, that they do not dig up by the roots and turn over, no history that they do not drag before the club for final judgment. In every little village there is ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... all together and get them laughing you can do anything you like with them. Once they start to laugh they are lost. So they got Mr. Dreery, the English Literature teacher at the high school, to give an evening of readings from the Great Humorists from Chaucer to Adam Smith. They came mighty near to making a barrel of money out of that. If the people had once started laughing it would have been all over with them. As it was I heard a lot of them say that they simply wanted to scream with laughter: they said they just felt ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... to let them live betimes. No longer now that golden age appears, When Patriarch-wits surviv'd a thousand years: Now length of Fame (our second life) is lost, 480 And bare threescore is all ev'n that can boast; Our sons their fathers' failing language see, And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be. So when the faithful pencil has design'd Some bright Idea of the master's mind, 485 Where a new world leaps out at his command, And ready Nature waits upon his hand; When the ripe colours soften and unite, And sweetly melt into just ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... ourselves in yet another version of a northern tale. Morris retains the old idiom that he invented for his translations, and keeps the tyro thumbing his dictionary, but the charm is increased by the archaisms. As one seeks the words in the dictionary, one learns that Chaucer, Spenser and the Ballads were the wells from which he drew these rare words, and that his employment of them is only another phase of his love for the old far-off things. It is true that the language ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... oaken beams with graceful braces is still in good condition. Above this was the Hospitium, or guest chamber, where may be seen the hooded chimney-piece and the hearth before which old-time travellers rested o' nights and told tales that Chaucer might have loved, before retiring to the smaller chambers, to sleep heavily after the good cheer provided by their priestly hosts. In front of this relic stands the old market cross; and near by, until within the nineteenth century, were ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... such magnificence that king and Parliament often preferred a sojourn with them to abiding at Westminster, had in general grown accustomed to concentrate their activity upon the spiritual direction of the higher classes. But though they counted among them Englishmen of eminence (one of these was Chaucer's friend, "the philosophical Strode"), they in truth never played a more than secondary part in this country, to whose soil the delicate machinery of the Inquisition, of which they were by choice the managers, was never congenial. Of far greater importance for the population ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... Wyatt. Roman Art at Cirencester (with Engravings). The Congress of Vienna and Prince de Ligne. Letter of H.R.H. the Duke of York in 1787. Monuments in Oxford Cathedral (with two Plates). Michael Drayton and his "Idea's Mirrour." Date of the erection of Chaucer's Tomb. Letters of Dr. Maitland and Mr. Stephens on The Ecclesiastical History Society: with Remarks. The British Museum Catalogue and Mr. Panizzi. Reviews of Correspondence of Charles V., the Life of Southey, &c., &c., Notes of the Month, Literary and ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 44, Saturday, August 31, 1850 • Various
... marked preference for deeds done, and attempt no character-drawing.... A sense of the instability of human life, very present to the minds of men familiar with battle and plague, is everywhere mirrored in these romances.' Then came Chaucer, who not only wrote prose tales, but also carried far toward perfection the art of narration in verse; and 'in the fifteenth century both of the ancestors of the modern novel—that is, the novella or short pithy story after the manner of the Italians, and the romance of chivalry—appear ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... its stones, has ever been immortalized by authors and artists, but more than all else, the city has been a part of the very life and inspiration of those who have limned its virtues, its joys, and its sorrows,—from the days of blithe Dan Chaucer to those of the latest ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... of each bird. I have often offered him to rewrite the whole of the birds wherewith from early and lasting habits I was well acquainted, their characters and manners, interspersed with anecdotes and poetry, particularly from good old Chaucer, the bard of birds, and passages of every bearing brought together, flinging over the whole what may be called the poetic bloom of nature, in which none have so sweetly succeeded as honest White of Selborne. But this he always resolutely refused; alleging that his descriptions, whether original, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare with the Eglantine! This delicious plant, known here as Sweetbrier (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 and Tennessee ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... mingled freely in the 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 ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... England didn't come about till 1707, nearly a century afterwards. You really haven't anything to do with him! But as for us, we didn't leave England until 1620, when Shakespeare had been perfectly dead four years. We took very good care not to come away too soon. Chaucer and Spenser were dead, too, and we had ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... first opens Chaucer, or any other ancient poet, is so much struck with the obsolete spelling, multiplied consonants, and antiquated appearance of the language, that he is apt to lay the work down in despair, as encrusted too deep with the rust of antiquity, to permit his judging of ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... grave-stone. That he lived, and that he died, and that he was "a little lower than the angels;"—these make up pretty nearly the amount of our undisputed report. It may be doubted, indeed, whether at this day we arc as accurately acquainted with the life of Shakspeare as with that of Chaucer, though divided from each other by an interval of two centuries, and (what should have been more effectual towards oblivion) by the wars of the two roses. And yet the traditional memory of a rural ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the word pig in its original sense of the young of the hog and sow; though they will say chickens for poultry. In England we talk of pigs and chickens when we mean swine and poultry. Chaucer has ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... and I do not doubt authentically, the services so rendered by him to the law. It cannot be said that they were noteworthy, though it might be difficult to find a more distinguished person who has borne the title, unless we make exception for the very father of literature himself, whom Chaucer, with amusing illustration of the way in which words change their meanings, calls "that ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Trophonius strikes us at once as affording a clue to THE CAVE into which Venus fled, giving great probability to Valens as the true solution of Chaucer's meaning. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... dearest Harry, you will needs request A short account of all the Muse-possess'd, That, down from Chaucer's days to Dryden's times, Have spent their noble rage in British rhymes; Without more preface, writ in formal length, To speak the undertaker's want of strength, I'll try to make their several beauties known, And show their verses' worth, though ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... does not appear to have danced very much, but to have left this to the joculator, and dancing and tumbling and even acrobatic women and dancers appear to have become common before the time of Chaucer's "Tomblesteres." ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... Portions of classical and of continental literature were accessible to him in translations. Nor are we without strong reasons for believing that, in addition to his "small Latin and less Greek," he found or made time to form a tolerable reading acquaintance with Italian and French. Chaucer, too, "the day-star," and Spenser, "the sunrise," of English poetry, were pouring their beauty round his walks. From all these, and from the growing richness and abundance of contemporary literature, his all-gifted and ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... which they really expressed themselves would be unintelligible to all but the few who have made the study of our ancient tongue their pursuit—far more unintelligible to those of ordinary education than Latin or French. Therefore it would be mere affectation to copy the later orthography of Chaucer, or to interlard one's sentences with obsolete words. The only course seems to be a fair translation of the vernacular of the period of the tale into our own everyday English. The Author anticipated this objection in the preface to his earlier volume. He repeats his answer for those ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... and contemplative than towards the active life. His brother, at this time, appeared to him to be of a more pleasure-loving and adventurous disposition; and there exists a letter to his mother in which, after contrasting, with obvious allusion to Chaucer's "Prologue", the mediaeval ideals of the Knight and the Clerk, he adds: "C. is the Knight and I the Clerk, deriving more keen pleasure from the perusal of a musty old volume than in pursuing adventure out in the world." But about the middle of his Harvard career, a marked change came ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... convincing and his enthusiasm of the most catching nature. Having arrived at Hazlitt or Leigh Hunt, you can branch off once more at any one of ten thousand points into still wider circles. And thus you may continue up and down the centuries as far as you like, yea, even to Chaucer. If you chance to read Hazlitt on *Chaucer and Spenser*, you will probably put your hat on instantly and go out and buy these authors; such is his communicating fire! I need not particularise further. Commencing ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... magni aut humiles sumus.' When the King's commissioners hear of the King's navy from Spain, they are in such jollity that they talk loud. . . . In the mean time—as the wife of Bath sath in Chaucer by her husband, we owe them not a word. If we should die tomorrow; I hope her Majesty will find by our writings that the honour of the cause, in the opinion of the world, must be with her Majesty; and that her commissioners are, neither of such imperfection in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... has sold a portion of his library, consisting of early editions of SHAKSPEARE and CHAUCER, to an American dealer for L200,000. His Grace is said to have calculated that, if he replaced these books by the nice handy little editions which are now to be obtained for sixpence and a shilling a-piece, the transaction would mean a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... is a remarkable thing if an author has his pocket picked, or narrowly escapes being in a ship that is wrecked, or takes poison when he is young, even the outline of Borrow's life is attractive. Like Byron, Ben Jonson, and Chaucer, he reminds us that an author is not bound to be a nun with a beard. He depicts himself continually, at all ages, and in all conditions of pathos or pride. Other human beings, with few exceptions, he depicts only in relation to himself. He never ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... of New-Yorke, yee can tell a Philadelphienne by hir sober yet rich garbe, so that ye Cosmopolite sayth: 'Per ma fe! thatt is a ladye, I know shee is, by the waye shee lookes.' And trulie, as Dan Chaucer sayeth, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... Geisner. "Look at English! An endless list, such as surely before the world never saw. You cannot even name them all. Spencer and Chaucer living still. Shakespeare, whoever he was, immortal for all time, dimming like a noontide sun a galaxy of stars that to other nations would be suns indeed! Take Marlow, Beaumont and Fletcher, a dozen playwrights! ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... fast in fires,] Chaucer has a similar passage with regard to eternal punishment—"And moreover the misery of Hell shall be in default of meat ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... 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, have gone to the making of it: ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... been in England, as John Stuart Mill says, a class of women who glory in the utter self-abnegation of the wife to the husband, as the special crown of womanhood. Their patron saint is the Griselda of Chaucer, who, when her husband humiliates her, and treats her as a brute, still accepts all with meek, unquestioning, uncomplaining devotion. He tears her from her children; he treats her with personal abuse; he repudiates her,—sends her out to nakedness and poverty; he installs another mistress ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... "I'm not. Though were we living in Chaucer's time I might; and you would not think it even silly. What I'm impressing upon you is that the human race has yet a little way to travel before the average man can be regarded as an up-to-date edition of King Arthur—the King Arthur of the poetical legend, I mean. Don't ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... Privilege, The History of a Fortunate Idea, and the Catholic Priest. Meanwhile, he did add considerably to his Droll Tales, the first series of which appeared in the same twelve months as Eugenie Grandet. These stories —in the style of Boccaccio, and of some of Chaucer's writing—broad, racy, and somewhat licentious, albeit containing nothing radically obscene, were meant to illustrate the history of the French language and French manners from olden to modern days. Only part of the project was realized. They are told with ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... not until the end of the fifteenth century that knives were used at table, other than those which were carried at the girdle, every man using his own cutlery. In England, Sheffield was early noted for the manufacture of knives, for Chaucer tells us, "A Scheffeld thwitel bare he in his hose." Another form of spelling the word which denoted knife was troytel, and from these terms is derived "whittle." The jack knife came in in the days of James I, after whom it was named, the original ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... garbed appropriately as Chaucer's Prioress, received the company at the top of the sun-dial steps, looking, in the opinion of the Foursome League, quite sufficiently like the ghost of yesterday to have justified squeals had they met her alone. When the ceremony of introduction ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... 'illi', 'optume' than 'optima', and any bad word rather than any good one, provided he can but prove, that strictly speaking, it is Latin; that is, that it was written by a Roman. By this rule, I might now write to you in the language of Chaucer or Spenser, and assert that I wrote English, because it was English in their days; but I should be a most affected puppy if I did so, and you would not understand three words of my letter. All these, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the few distinguished Frenchmen, exiled by Louis XIV, whose distinguished abilities as a warrior and philosopher awarded him a last resting place in Westminster Abbey. His tomb, surmounted by a marble bust, is situated in the nave near the cloister, located among those of Barrow, Chaucer, Spenser, Cowley ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... year. The story is not a happy one, but the lines are harmonious. It is often worth our while to inquire how poetry has become such as it is, and how the altered and improved phases of versification have arisen. To trace our melody from Chaucer to Tennyson is matter of interest to us all. Of Cicero as a poet we may say that he found Latin versification rough, and left it smooth and musical. Now, as we go on with the orator's life and prose works, we need ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... find themselves Alive along these crowded shelves; And Shakespeare treads again his stage, And Chaucer paints ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... man ther was of religion, That was a poure Persone of a toune; But rich he was of holy thought and work, He also was a learned man a clerk.—CHAUCER ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... of Italians, he has omitted Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso; in his list of Spaniards, Lope and Calderon; in his list of French, Pascal, Bossuet, Moliere, Corneille, Racine, and Boileau; and in his list of English, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... are thousands of almshouses, built by the men of trade alone. And when you are discontented with the great, and murmur, repiningly, of Marvel in his garret, or Milton in his hiding-place, turn in justice to the Good among the great. Read how John of Lancaster loved Chaucer and sheltered Wicliff. There have been Burkes as well as Walpoles. Russell remembered Banim's widow, ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... have asserted that the whisky, brandy, and rum seemed always to stand at the same level. Poetry was there: the left-hand corner of the room was lined with as complete a set of English classics as the right hand could show of English and foreign physiologists. But if one took a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that rank, its absence irritated the mind like a gap in a man's front teeth. One could not say the books were never read; probably they were, but there was a sense of their being chained to their places, like the Bibles in the old churches. Dr Hood treated his ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... "Read Chaucer for strength," he advises Stoddard on January 7, 1850, "read Spenser for ease and sweetness, read Milton for sublimity and thought, read Shakespeare for all these things, and for something else which is his alone. Get out of your age as far ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... when work was slack, I carried her to the water-side, where she might sit and watch the river flowing past. And to reward me she made me read her about King Arthur and his knights, and stories from Mr Chaucer's book; much of which I understood not, though (being a printer's 'prentice), I knew ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... Pope. (See previous note on Pope.) The hint of this poem is taken from one by Chaucer, called 'The House ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... of Women and their Tutors. Zenobia and Longinus. Countess of Pembroke and Daniel. Princess Elizabeth and Descartes. Caroline of Brunswick and Leibnitz. Lady Jane Grey and Elmer. Elizabeth Robinson and Middleton. Hester Salusbury and Dr. Collier. Blanche of Lancaster and Chaucer. Venetia Digby and Ben Jonson. Countess of Bedford and Ben Jonson. Countess Ranelagh and Milton. Duchess of Queensbury and Gay. Relations with Women, of Sophocles, Virgil, Frauenlob, Bernadin St. Pierre, Rousseau, and Jean Paul Richter. Rahel Levin ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... was devoted to the "Best Stories," and an admirable set they were! I wish that anything of mine were worthy to go into such company. His purity of feeling, almost ascetic, led him to reject Boccaccio, but he admitted Chaucer and some of Balzac's, and Smollett, Goldsmith, and De Foe, and Walter Scott's best, Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Bernardin St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," and "Three Months under the Snow," and Charles Lamb's generally overlooked ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... 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 in imitation is one ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... murderous deeds of old, The grisly story Chaucer told, And many an ugly tale beside Of children caught and crucified; I heard the ducat-sweating thieves Beneath the Ghetto's slouching eaves, And, thrust beyond the tented green, The lepers ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... these plays is the most characteristic and important. It takes up the old story of patient Grizzel which the Clerk of Oxford told Chaucer's pilgrims on the way to Canterbury. But a new motive animates the fable. Not to try her patience, not to edify womankind, does the count rob Griselda of her child. His burning and exclusive love is ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... and even to the mouse. And what is true of the individual is equally true of the race. The earliest voices in the literature of any nation are those of song. In Greece Homer, like his favorite cicada, chirps right gladly, and in England Chaucer and Shakespeare are first of all bards. In France and Germany it is even difficult to find the separate prominent singers, for there the whole nation, whatever hath articulate voice in it, takes ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... manner,—up to the writing of this present copyright 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. The coldest word was once a glowing ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... experience has shown the very small number of those inheritors of the speech of Cynewulf, Chaucer, and Shakspere, who care two guineas a year for the records of that speech: 'Let the dead past bury its dead' is still the cry of Great Britain and her Colonies, and of America, in the matter of language. The Society has never had money enough to produce the Texts that could easily have been ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... such experiments as the Terentian plays of the Saxon nun Hroswitha in the tenth century may be safely dismissed as negligible, or, at most, advanced as proof of a broad tendency, evidence of which may be traced in the "infernal pageants" to which Godwin alludes in his "Life of Chaucer," and which, as regards Italy, are for ever memorable in connexion with the Bridge of Carrara—a story familiar to all students of Dante. These "infernal pageants" were concerned with the destiny of souls after death, and their scope being different ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... will soon rival the Dutch in these baubles. [Clockwork appears to have been introduced into England in the reign of Edward III., when three Dutch horologers were invited over from Delft. They must soon have passed into common use, for Chaucer thus familiarly ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... continues in various degrees of perfection. There is no other name for him, but one hears it rarely; yet the shining virtue of democratization is that it has produced a kind of tacit agreement with Chaucer's Parson that 'to have pride in the gentrie of the bodie is right gret folie; for oft-time the gentrie of the bodie benimeth the gentrie of the soul; and also we be all of one fader and one moder.' And although there are few men nowadays who would insist that they are gentlemen, there is ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... came to be blent with the tomb-ritual of a hero, the term peripeteia acquired a special association with a sudden decline from prosperity into adversity. In the Middle Ages, this was thought to be the very essence and meaning of tragedy, as we may see from Chaucer's lines: ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... they consisted, not of actual performances, but of the works which the authors only planned, without ever finding the happy season to achieve them. To take familiar instances, here were the untold tales of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims; the unwritten cantos of the Fairy Queen; the conclusion of Coleridge's Christabel; and the whole of Dryden's projected epic on the subject of King Arthur. The shelves were crowded; for it ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to thy distillage went, Keats, and Gotama excellent, Omar Khayyam, and Chaucer bright, ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... a moment, unconscious that his term for an interpreter was one that Englishmen had used in Chaucer's day, and, save here, not since a long-gone time. Then he swept on, and Sim Squires listening to this man whom for hire he had waylaid felt an unmanning creep of terror along his spine; a fear such as he had not felt for any human being before. The ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... expression in the following passage 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
... none at first view are more attractive than that which prescribes for every parish a resident incumbent. How agreeable to picture to one's self, as has been done by poets and romance writers, from Chaucer down to Goldsmith, a man devoted to his ministerial office, with not a wish or a thought ranging beyond the circuit of its cares! Nor is it in poetry and fiction only that such characters are found; they are scattered, it is hoped ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... 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 idea ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... eventful century which began with Henry VIII., and ended with Elizabeth, he was the earliest of our great modern writers in poetry, as Hooker was the earliest of our great modern writers in prose. In that reviving English literature, which, after Chaucer's wonderful promise, had been arrested in its progress, first by the Wars of the Roses, and then by the religious troubles of the Reformation, these two were the writers who first realized to Englishmen ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... Dodsley), he should, I think, have added, that it was an old way of writing spar. In Shakspeare's Prologue to Troilus and Cressida, it is written sperr. Sparred, quoted by Richardson from the Romance of the Rose, and Troilus and Creseide, is in the edition of Chaucer referred to by Tyrwhitt, written in the Romance "spered," and in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... he was not indisposed to enhance the dignity of the wreath by classing Chaucer and Spenser, as we have seen, among its wearers. The genuine claims of Warton to respect probably saved him from the customary attacks. Bating a few bungling thrusts amid the doggerel of "Peter Pindar," he escaped scathless,—gaining, on the other hand, a far more than ordinary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... pilgrims to "Our Lady under the Earth" were the standing resource of those (such there were at Chartres as everywhere else) who must needs depend for the interest of their existence on the doings of their neighbours. A motley host, only needing their Chaucer to figure as a looking-glass of life, type against type, they brought with them, on the one hand, the very presence and perfume of Paris, the centre of courtly propriety and fashion; on the other hand, with faces which seemed to belong to another age, curiosities of existence from ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... (Vol. ii., p. 460.) may be acted upon. The admirers of George Herbert are doubtless so numerous, that the correct and complete restoration of Bemerton Church might be effected by means of a small subscription among them, as in the case of the Chaucer monument. Most gladly would I aid ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... later religions, like that of Mahomet, have their Meccas, as the Roman Church has her Loretto and her Lourdes. The murder of Thomas a Becket was followed by the Canterbury pilgrimages, immortalized by Chaucer. "From the lowest Fetichism up to Christianity itself this general and unconquerable propensity has either been sanctioned by religion or sprung up out of it."[1] Humanity leans more readily on the Incarnate Savior than on Him who was "before the world was." To-day the devout Christian ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... hovering o'er a song begun, And smile that warmed the world with benison, Our father, lord long since of lordly rhyme, Long since hath haply ridden, when the lime Bloomed broad above him, flowering where he came. Because thy passage once made warm this clime, Our father Chaucer, here we ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... pity married Chaucer, She had been upon the shelf, For same reason he'll divorce her, Pity—this ...
— Why They Married • James Montgomery Flagg
... architecture, or of monuments of the dead, or with the history of the thoroughfares he frequents, and he will be pleasantly constrained to reflection upon those who have gone before him. As he stands in the shadow of an ancient church he will think to himself: "By this very wall Chaucer may have stood." As he walks amid the reverberating ravines which are city streets he will say: "Here along green and silent paths the Roman legionary marched when Hadrian ruled the world." When once the faculty of observation has been awakened to a permanent alertness, ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... round this room I feel sure Two, and Five, and Seven, have all been at work on it, and made no mistakes, for round the walls runs a frieze of squat standard rose-trees, red as red can be, and just like those that Alice saw in the Queen's garden. In between them are Chaucer's name-children, prim little daisies, peering wideawake from green grass. This same grass has a history which I have heard. In the original stencil for the frieze it was purely conventional like the rest, and met in spikey curves round each tree; the painter, however, ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... impossible. They could only be answered by the public voice, and before I dared question that oracle I had much to do. I resolved to discipline myself to the harness of rhythm. I resolved to go back to the fathers of poetry—to graduate once again in Homer and Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare. I promised myself that, before I tried my wings in the sun, I would be my own severest critic. Nay, more—that I would never try them so long as it seemed possible a fall might come of it. ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... unrivalled among living poets, except sometimes by Tennyson. His literary career has been contemporary with the sensational school, but he has been entirely untainted by it, and in the present volume, "Tales of a Wayside Inn," his style has a tranquil lucidity which recalls Chaucer. The literary style of an intellectually introverted age or author will always be somewhat obscure, however gorgeous; but Longfellow's mind takes a simple, child-like hold of life, and his style never betrays the inadequate effort to describe thoughts or emotions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... linguistic group from English, and having close affinities to Irish and Welsh. This tongue Burns did not know. Lowland Scots is a dialect of English, descended from the Northumbrian dialect of Anglo-Saxon. It has had a history of considerable interest. Down to the time of Chaucer, whose influence had much to do with making the Midland dialect the literary standard for the Southern kingdom, it is difficult to distinguish the written language of Edinburgh from that of York, both being developments of Northumbrian. But ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... for O'Daly. After that I met with many old people who had in the days before the Famine seen or talked with the wandering poet who was in the succession of those who had made and recited their lyrics on the Irish roads before Chaucer wrote. ...
— The Kiltartan Poetry Book • Lady Gregory
... 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 to seek in ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... friend of Rowlatt and met him on terms of social equality. Paul expanded like a flower to the sun. It was the first time he had spoken with an educated man on common ground—a man to whom the great imaginative English writers were familiar friends, who ran from Chaucer to Lamb and from Dryden to Browning with amazing facility. The strong wine of allusive talk mounted to Paul's brain. Tingling with excitement, he brought out all his small artillery of scholarship and acquitted himself so well that his host sent him off with a cordial ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... taken from the best English authors, and he had a profound and practical belief in the advantage to be gained from the reading of English. "If a man," he wrote, "cannot get literary culture out of his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes, and Bishop Berkeley, to mention only a few of our illustrious writers—I say, if he cannot get it out of these writers, he cannot get it out of anything." He had at least a fair knowledge of Greek in the original, and a very wide acquaintance with Greek ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... sure of it, Mr. Fox," cried Dorothy; clapping her hands. "Persuade him to stay awhile in London, that you may have him at your next theatricals at Holland House. Why, he knows Shakespeare and Pope and—and Chaucer by heart, and Ovid and Horace,—is it not so, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... tremulous. It followed on the sound of a loud sneeze. Either the voice or the sneeze (or both) aroused her, and she sat up in bed with a start. Like Chaucer's Canace, of sleep "She was ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... at different periods been distinguished by different appellations, Defensores, Oeconomi, and Prpositi Ecclesi, Testes Synodales, &c. In the time of Edward III. they were called Church Reves, as we read in Chaucer: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... familiar, but I have not found it easy to trace. In "The Book of Sindibad" (p. 83) it is apparently represented by a lacuna. In the Squire's Tale of Chaucer Canace's ring enables the wearer to understand bird-language, not merely to pretend as does the slave-boy ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... ideas of a child may be very well worth listening to, 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? With a sense of the ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... of the roads, the only practicable modes of travelling were on foot and on horseback. The poor walked and the rich rode. Kings rode and Queens rode. Judges rode circuit in jack-boots. Gentlemen rode and robbers rode. The Bar sometimes walked and sometimes rode. Chaucer's ride to Canterbury will be remembered as long as the English language lasts. Hooker rode to London on a hard-paced nag, that he might be in time to preach his first sermon at St. Paul's. Ladies rode on pillions, holding on by the gentleman ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... wrote papa that she and Mr. Blackwood had just received some very rare old books from Europe," she said, "among them a Chaucer,—and beside that, a charming Corot; so, Fee, both you and papa will have something to enjoy, while Nora and ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... little, I think, as is possible, considering how much he has written. You will easily understand my meaning, when I refer to his versification of Palamon and Arcite, as contrasted with the language of Chaucer. Dryden had neither a tender heart nor a lofty sense of moral dignity. Whenever his language is poetically impassioned, it is mostly upon unpleasing subjects, such as the follies, vices, and crimes of classes of men or of individuals, That his cannot be the language ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... modulations of the voice: in poetry the same thing is done systematically by a regular collocation of syllables. It has been well observed, that every one who declaims warmly, or grows intent upon a subject, rises into a sort of blank verse or measured prose. The merchant, as described in Chaucer, went on his way "sounding always the increase of his winning." Every prose-writer has more or less of rhythmical adaptation, except poets, who, when deprived of the regular mechanism of verse, seem to have no principle of modulation ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... whose bark puts forth full-sailed For summer; May, whom Chaucer hailed With all his happy might of heart, And gave thy rosebright daisy-tips Strange fragrance from his amorous lips That still thine own breath seems to part And sweeten till each word they say Is even a ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... I firmly believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time. Chaucer is anterior; and on other grounds, too, he cannot well be brought into the comparison. But taking the roll of our chief poetical names, besides Shakespeare and Milton, from the age of Elizabeth downwards, and going through ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... bend, was one of the seven 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
... 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 have already faded from the view of the most numerous class ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... became familiar with many titles at least, which had been perfectly unknown to me before. I found a perfect set of our poets-perfect according to the notion of the editor and the issue of the publisher, although it omitted both Chaucer and George Herbert. I began to nibble at that portion of the collection which belonged to the sixteenth century; but with little success. I found nothing, to my idea, but love poems without any love in them, ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... 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 theorem; ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... Individual goes home, as Chaucer says, "in dumps," and determines to take the boots under her own supervision. First, she inks over all the gray parts. Then she takes some sealing-wax, and sticks down all the bits of cuticle torn up. Then, in lieu of anything ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... Those were nights of royal fellowships, of introduction into the noblest society the world has ever known, and it is the recollection of this companionship which gives those days under college roofs a unique and perennial charm. Then first the spirit of our own race was revealed to us in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton; then first we thrilled to that music which has never faltered since Caedmon found his voice in answer to the heavenly vision. There are days which will always have a place by themselves ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... century, on 214 folios of vellum. In a volume (No. 39) is a copy of the Gospel of Nicodemus in an English version beginning, "Whanne Pylatus was reuler and justyse of ye Jewerye, and Rufus and Leo were consuls." Another book of more than ordinary interest is Chaucer's translation of Boethius' "De Consolatione Philosophiae," on vellum in double columns, fifteenth century. A twelfth century MS. of the "Historia Regum Brittaniae," by Geoffrey de Monmouth (No. 121); and the "Historia ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... his journal, and beginning at the ante-penultimate page, read aloud:—"To-day—Sold to that old miser of a bookseller, my rare copy of Chaucer, the costly edition of Caxton. My friend, the dear, noble Andreas Vandelmeer, made me a present of it on my birthday, when we were at the university together. He had written to London for it himself: paid an enormous price for it; and then had it bound, after his own taste, in rich Gothic style. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... works of Chaucer, Pope, Keats, Milton, Browning, and other great poets, teeming with interest, and with which all minds should be conversant, are here presented in extremely fascinating prose narrative, beautifully illustrated in colour and black and white by Frank Adams. Printed on rough art paper. 12 full-page ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... from 1827, following three former spires, each of which was burned. The architect responsible for this monstrosity sought to combine two fabrics in incoherent proportions. More than one authority decries the use of iron as a constructive element, and Chaucer's description of the Temple of Mars in the Knight's ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... himself in the mental attitude of a man of the Middle Ages towards nature; yet only by so doing can he appreciate the solutions that the philosophers of the time offered of the problems of nature. Our author affords perhaps the simplest way of learning what Chaucer and perhaps Shakespeare knew and believed of their surroundings—earth, air, and sea. The plan on which his work was constructed led Bartholomew in order over the universe from God and the angels—through ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... or so beyond the ruins of Sandown Castle there is an old inn, called the "Checkers of the Hope," or "The Checkers," named after, it is said, and corrupted from, "Chaucer's Inn" at Canterbury. It stands in the midst of the solitary waste; a sort of half-way house between the towns of Sandwich and Deal; far removed from either, however, and quite beyond earshot of any human dwelling. This, so says report, was a celebrated resort of smugglers in days ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... that seems to bring all the promise of the blessed season with it; indeed, that clod of fresh turf with the inhalation of which Lord Bacon delighted to begin the day must undoubtedly have been full of the roots of our little hepatica. Its healthy sweetness belongs to the opening year, like Chaucer's poetry; and one thinks that anything more potent and voluptuous would be less enchanting,—until one turns to the May-flower. Then comes a richer fascination for the senses. To pick the May-flower is like following in the footsteps of some spendthrift ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... the purple light of Fancy, from his ambrosial wings, over all nature? What is there of the might of Milton, whose head is canopied in the blue serene, and who takes us to sit with him there? What is there (in his ambling rhymes) of the deep pathos of Chaucer? Or of the o'er-informing power of Shakespear, whose eye, watching alike the minutest traces of characters and the strongest movements of passion, "glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven," ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... other subjects, have gathered about them so rich a literature, or been intertwined with so much philological and historical lore. Not the least of this is to be found in the English classics, from which we propose to make one or two selections. We begin where English poetry begins, with Dan Chaucer; and from many beautiful conceits turning upon chess, we select one which must receive universal admiration. It is from the "Booke of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... had a general impression of Jonathan's library as of century-old preserves, altogether dried up and quite indistinguishable one from the other except by labels. Poetry she could not imagine as being there at all. Finally she thought of the early Victorians, and Spenser and Chaucer. The library might include them, but she had an idea that Spenser and Chaucer were not fit reading for a little boy. However, as she remembered Spenser and Chaucer, she doubted if Johnny could understand much of them. Probably he had gotten hold of an early Victorian, ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... easy and my size.' I wondered if you were on the football team or crew, and it crossed my mind what a perfect shame it was to drag a man like you away from a dance in town, perhaps, to a stupid dinner with one of the faculty. And then you began to talk with Will about—what was it—Chaucer? Anyhow something terrifying, and I knew then that you were Professor ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... what doth not to thee fall; Do well thyself, before thou striv'st to lead, And truth shall thee deliver without dread. —GEOFFREY CHAUCER ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... no other character. None of them, I presume, had ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me, if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in the least, had those same unprofitable pages been written with a pen like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a custom-house officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson—though it may often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and all his fire died out of him at having to face the fair. "Reason will be wasted. Authority is the only weapon. My profession and my reading have both taught me that the whole character of her sex undergoes a change the moment a man interferes with their dress. From Chaucer's day to our own, neither public satire nor private remonstrance has ever shaken any of their monstrous fashions. Easy, obliging, pliable, and weaker of will than men in other things, do but touch their dress, however objectionable, and rock is not harder, iron is not more stubborn, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... advent of these strange beliefs is impossible, for who can tell how or when they originated? We can only describe them at the time of their destruction. Chaucer, writing in the fourteenth century, seemed to imagine that belief in elves and fairies had received its death-blow in his own time, for in "The Wife of ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... "verdures." In time the names "verdure" and "Oudenarde" became interchangeably associated with this class of tapestry. They represented woodland and hunting scenes, and were also called "Tapestry verde," and are alluded to by Chaucer. ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... have read the first half of this volume, containing selected and simplified stories from some of the greatest books of all time, their authors will cease to be merely names. Homer, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Cervantes and Bunyan will be found here as familiar and easy in style as "Cinderella" or "The Three Bears." True enough, the first word in "Classic Tales" may look somewhat alarming to the eyes of youthful seekers after romance and adventure, but we challenge ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... The panels and beams of ceiling are of stained and dull varnished fir. The drawing room woodwork, and furniture throughout, is painted a mottled greenish blue, after the same manner as the hall. The decorations of this room, when complete, are intended to illustrate Chaucer's "House of Fame." The chimney-piece, of alabaster, is surmounted by a Caen-stone design, on a rock of glass, showing the entrance to the castle, with the various figures mentioned in the poem, carved ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... true literature among periodicals. In 1864 he joined his friend, Professor Norton, in the editorship of the North American Review, to which he gave much of the distinction for which this periodical was once so worthily famous. In this first appeared his masterly essays on the great poets, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and the others, which were gathered into the three volumes, Among My Books, first and second series, and My Study Windows. Variety was given to this critical writing by such charming ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... objective writer, on 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 ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... Cases-street after the Cases. Mr. Rose, who projected many streets at the north end of the town on his extensive property, seems to have adopted the poets' names to distinguish his thoroughfares, as in Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Juvenal, Virgil, Dryden, Milton, Sawney (Alexander) Pope-street, etc. Meadows-street, Scotland-road, was named after Mr. William Meadows, who married six wives. His first wife lived two years. He next married Peggy Robinson, who lived twenty years, and bore ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... to note how repugnant every oceanic idea appears to be to the whole nature of our principal English mediaeval poet, Chaucer. Read first the Man of Lawe's Tale, in which the Lady Constance is continually floated up and down the Mediterranean, and the German Ocean, in a ship by herself; carried from Syria all the way to Northumberland, and there wrecked upon the ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... Packed in the mountain's adamantine heart, Or slyly wrapt in unsuspected sand— The dross men toil for, and oft stain the soul. How vain and all ignoble seems that greed To him who stands in this dim claustral air With these most sacred ashes at his feet! This dust was Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden this— The spark that once illumed it lingers still. O ever-hallowed spot of English earth! If the unleashed and happy spirit of man Have option to revisit our dull globe, What ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... risen, and none e'er shall rise. Just in one instance be it yet confest Your people, sir, are partial in the rest: Foes to all living worth except your own, And advocates for folly dead and gone. Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old; It is the rust we value, not the gold. Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote, And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: One likes no language but the Faery Queen; A Scot will fight for Christ's Kirk o' the Green: And each true Briton is to Ben so civil, He swears the Muses met him at the devil. Though ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... in 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 ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... adopted the birth-day order: for that is the simplest. And I have begun with—not Chaucer, nor Spenser, nor the ballads, but—Shakespeare and Agincourt; for it seemed to me that a book of heroism could have no better starting-point than that heroic pair of names. As for the ballads, I have placed them, after much considering, ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... but one at least of the carols was probably written in the last half of the fourteenth century. They seem indeed to be the later blossomings of the great springtime of English literature, the period which produced Chaucer and Langland, an innumerable company of minstrels and ballad-makers, and the mystical poet, Richard Rolle ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... 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's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... become enamoured with the English language, and emptied it into his eyes from Chaucer to Stevenson. He most affected Charles Lamb and Laurence Sterne; he also loved the Bible for its canorous prose, and on hot afternoons as the boys lolled about his room, he thundered forth bits of Job and ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... disciples make out of Homer. In one way or other they tear asunder the structure and transform it backwards in a collection, allowing it hardly as much unity as may be found in the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. A school more recent than that of Wolf, the Comparative Philologists, have gone still further backwards, and have reduced Homer to the first stage, to a nature-myth. The merit of both schools is that they have called attention ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... 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 |
