> His Life and Minor Poems.
There is an indescribable pleasure in gazing through the long vistas of years, and conjuring before our minds men who thought, acted, and wrote in tho3e old times, when mankind, in comparison with the present day, were in a state of .semi civilization, ere the researches of science had displaced the sweltering mass of superstition that pervaded all classes of society, when the beauties of literature had been explored by a few only who covild snatch time and inclination from the turmoil and trouble of daily life to devote a few hours to contemplation and study. But more especially do we find pleasure in perusing the writings of these men, in finding ourselves carried back to and living in a different age, in listening to and conversing with beings of that age as freely and naturally as if we ourselves had formed a part and portion thereof. It is this indescribable pleasure I have described that we feel in perusing the works of Chaucer.
Perhaps no other poet in the brilliant annals of English literature has so faith fully delineated the manners and customs and the state of society in the time in which he lived, a time when feudalism ■was on the verge of its prime, ere it entered on the decrepitudes and infirmi ties of old age, when the fusion of the Norman and Anglo-Saxan races the English nation had just been completed, and the English tongue, which was soon to maintain such an important position in the literature of Europe, was just emerg ing triumphantly from the obscurity in which it had lain since the Conquest.
