This old French and Anglo-Norman word, answering to the Italian gentilezza, and signifying the possession of every species of refinement, has been retained as supplying a want which there is no modern word to fill up.—Leigh Hunt. The sententious sermon which here follows might have had a purely serious intention in Chaucer’s time, when books were rare, and moralities not such commonplaces as they are now; yet it is difficult to believe that the poet did not intend something of a covert satire upon at least the sermoniser’s own pretensions, especially as the latter had declared himself against text-spinning. The Host, it is to be observed, had already charged him with forgetting his own faults, while preaching against those of others. The refashioner of the original lines has accordingly endeavoured to retain the kind of tabernacle, or old woman’s tone, into which he conceives the Manciple to have fallen, compared with that of his narrative style.—Leigh Hunt. “We possess,” says Satan in Paradise Lost, “the quarters of the north.” The old legend that Milton followed placed Satan in the north parts of heaven, following the passage in Isaiah concerning Babylon on which that legend was constructed (Isa. xiv. 12–15), “Thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation in the sides of the north.” Alluding to the “Millers Tale,” which has rather offended the Reve, by reason that it ridiculed a worthy carpenter.—R. H. H. Or thus:—
For when our climbing’s done our speech aspires;
E’en in our ashes live their wonted fires.
The original lines are:—
“For whanne we may not don than wol we speken,
Yet in our ashen olde is fyre yreken.”
The coincidence of the last line with the one quoted from Gray’s Elegy will be remarked. Mr. Tyrwhit says he should certainly have considered the latter as an “imitation” (of Chaucer), “if Mr. Gray himself had not referred us to the 169 Sonnet of Petrarch as his original:—
Ch’ i’ veggio nel pensier, dolce mio foco,
Fredda una lingua, e duo begli occhi chiusi
Rimaner dopo noi pien’ di faville.
The sentiment is different in all three; but the form of expression here adopted by Gray closely resembles that of the Father of English Poetry, although in Gray’s time it was no doubt far more elegant to quote Petrarch than Chaucer.—R. H. Horne.
