Studies in Chaucer - 1891 Author:Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. THE lines quoted, a few pages previous, from Sir John Dcnham may be taken as representing the most favorable opinion that was usually held of Chaucer in t... more »he latter half of the seventeenth century. He is in them designated simply as the morning star of our literature. This is his distinction, and this alone. His work is a promise of the coming day rather than a realization of it. It is the unhappy fate, however, of morning stars, whether of the literary or of the natural heavens, to fall under the observation of very few eyes. The weight of evidence that at that time Chaucer was to most men of letters little more than a name is not impaired by the fact that in the midst of general ignorance or indifference individuals were still to be found who continued to look upon him as retaining the supremacy which for two centuries after his death had been unhesitatingly accorded him by the consent of all. Anthony Wood, for instance, in his great work, published 1691-2, still continues to call him the prince of English poets.1 But Wood was an antiquary. It was doubtless felt by his contemporaries that it was his business as an antiquary to recollect and praise what the rest of the world was doing all in its power to forget. Still, the class to which this scholar 1 Athena: Oxonienses, under ' Thynne.' belonged is not a class to be despised in the matter of influence; and it was far from being an inconspicuous part that it played in the revival that was now about to begin taking place in the poet's fame. For the reputation of Chaucer was speedily to enter upon a new phase. A great renovation was to be accomplished for it; and the chief impulse towards this result came from the hands of a poet who stood in about the same relation to the literature of the latter half of the sevent...« less