A favourite form of imaginative composition of those times was the romantic allegory, and Chaucer, taking up the fashion, has perpetuated it, especially in two poems, which the life-giving power of genius yet preserves. One of these, the "House of Fame," is known to modern readers chiefly through Pope's paraphrase, bearing the statelier title-a characteristic alteration-of the "Temple of Fame." This poem is not one on which I need stop for criticism, and I am about to mention it for quite a different purpose. It contains a passage which has struck me as in curious anticipation of a scientific hypothesis suggested in our own days; poetic imagination foreshadowing the results of scientific reasoning. In the ninth Bridgewater Treatise, from the pen of Mr. Babbage, he propounded a theory respecting the permanent impressions of our words-spoken words—a theory startling enough almost to close a man's lips in perpetual silence: "That the pulsations of the air, once set in motion by the human voice, cease not to exist with the sounds to which they give rise; that the waves of the air thus raised perambulate the earth and

lines; and all that he said impressed me with the feeling of his being of that genial, elevated, and kindly stamp which Wordsworth most delighted in. On coming to a walk at the foot of some rocks which my husband had engineered during his last visit, Mr. Reed said, 'How pleasant it is, that one whose heroic character and sufferings interested me so much, as a boy, in America, can now be associated with this lovely scene!' We parted with a promise that they would come and see me in the South. This they were unfortunately prevented doing, and we never met again.”—MS. Letter. I hope I violate no propriety in using a letter which never was intended for the public eye; but the temptation to give this glimpse of the last bright hours, the simple, natural tastes and pure imaginings, associated, like his great poetic models, with all that was beautiful in nature, of one whom it is now no flattery to praise, has been irresistible. W. B. R.

ocean's surface; and soon every atom of its atmosphere takes up the altered movement, due to the infinitesimal portion of the primitive motion which has been conveyed to it through countless channels, and which must continue to influence its paths throughout its future existence. Every atom," adds the philosopher, "impressed with good and with ill, retains at once the motions which philosophers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and combined, in ten thousand ways, with all that is worthless and base.

The atmosphere we breathe is the ever-living witness of the sentiments we have uttered, . . . . and (in another state of being) the offender may hear still vibrating in his ear the very words, uttered perhaps thousands of centuries before, which at once caused and registered his own condemnation."

Now I have no thought of intimating, in the most remote degree, that in this remarkable train of thought Mr. Babbage was under obligations to Chaucer. The passage has an air of absolute originality; and, besides, the writer of it is too strong-minded and manly to allow such obligations, if they existed, to pass unacknowledged. I have no sympathy with the spirit which delights in detecting plagiarisms in the casual and innocent coincidences which every student knows are frequently occurring. That there is such a coincidence worthy of notice, will be seen in these lines in The House of Fame:

"Sound is nought but air that's broken,
And every speeche that is spoken,
Whe'er loud or low, foul or fair,

In his substance is but air:

For as flame is but lighted smoke,
Right so is sound but air that's broke,
Eke where that men harpstrings smite

Whether that be much or lite,

Lo! with the stroke, the air it breaketh;

Thus wot'st thou well what thing is speech:
Now, henceforth, I will thee teach

How ever each speeche, voice or sown,
Through his multiplicion,

Though it were piped of a mouse,
Must needs come to Fame's House.
I prove it thus; taketh heed now
By experience, for if that thou
Throw in a water now a stone,
Well wot'st thou it will make anon
A little roundel as a circle,

Par venture as broad as a covércle,

And right anon thou shalt see well
That circle cause another wheel,

And that the third, and so forth, brother,

Every circle causing other,

Much broader than himselfen was:

Right so of air, my leve brother,

Ever each air another stirreth,

More and more and speech up beareth,

Till it be at the 'House of Fame.'"*

That this was mere coincidence, Mr. Reed ascertained, in conversation with Mr. Babbage, on his visit to England, in 1854., "I mentioned to him," Mr. Reed writes to a friend in America, "that I had once in a public lecture quoted from his Bridgewater Treatise the startling passage about the perpetuity of sound, and that some of my audience used to say that it almost made them afraid for some days to speak, from the dread that the sounds were to last, and mayhap come back to them in the hereafter: on telling him I had cited the passage in a literary connection, a curious paralelism with Chaucer, he expressed much surprise, and begged me to refer to the passage. It was all new to him."--MS. Letter.

A curious chapter on these perfectly innocent coincidences might be written for literary history is full of them. In Lockhart's Scott, (vol. x. p. 208,) it is said, "Dr. Watson, having consulted on all things with Mr. Clarkson and his father, resigned the patient to them, and

One of the brightest dreams that poet ever fashioned out of shadowy imaginings, is the allegory, "The Flower and the Leaf," with its beautiful moral, and an exuberance of fancy seldom met with out of the region of early poetry. A gentlewoman, seated in an arbour, beholds a great company of ladies and knights in a dance on the grass, which being ended, they all kneel down and do honour to the daisy-some to the flower, and some to the leaf; and the meaning thereof is this: "They which honour the flower, a thing fading with every blast, are such as look after beauty and worldly pleasure; but they that honour the leaf, which abideth with the root, notwithstanding the frosts and winter storms, are they which follow virtue and during qualities, without regard of worldly respects."

The fame of Chaucer rests, however, chiefly on the

returned to London. None of them could have any hope but that of soothing irritation. Recovery was no longer to be thought of, but there might be Euthanasia." A hundred years before Arbuthnot wrote to Pope, "a recovery in my case and at my age is impossible: the kindest wish of my friends is Euthanasia." Haydon, in his strange journal, writing in 1826, says, "There is hardly any thing new. I never literally stole but one figure in my life (Aaron) from Raphael. Yet to-day I found my Olympias, which I had dashed in in a heat, exactly a repetition of an Antigone, and the first thing I saw in the Louvre was Poussin's Judgment of Solomon, with Solomon in nearly the same position as in my picture. Yet I solemnly declare I never saw even the print when I conceived my Solomon, which was done one night, before I began to paint, at nineteen, when I lodged in Carey Street, and was ill in my eyes. I lay back in my chair, and indulged myself in composing my Solomon. I will venture to say, no painter but Wilkie will believe this, though it is as true as that two and two make four." Haydon's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 488; see also Wilmott's Pleasures of Literature, p. 259. W. B. R.

great work of his matured powers, showing how. genius carries forward the freshness of feeling for three-score years. I refer, of course, to the "Canterbury Tales," an unfinished poem, like the Faery Queen, and, like it, wonderful as a fragment, for the vast extent of what is achieved, as well as of what was planned. The design of this poem is one of the happiest thoughts that ever housed itself in a poet's heart. A chance-gathered company of pilgrims on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury, meet in a London inn, and the host proposes that they beguile the ride by each telling a tale to his fellow-pilgrims. Thus comes, with its large variety, the collection of the Canterbury Tales. The prologue, containing the description of the pilgrims, is better known, perhaps, than the rest of the work, partly, perhaps, from Stothard's well-known picture of the pilgrimage. From this prefatory poem of a few hundred lines, a truer and livelier conception of the state of society in England, five hundred years ago, can be got than from all other sources of information. It makes us more at home there in the distant years; carries us more into the spirit of the age; lets us see the men and the women of those times, to be among them and know their ways of life, manners, and dress, far better than any unimaginative record can do. There are a hundred thingsprime elements, too, in a nation's heart-that history never troubles itself with. The torch of a poet's imagination is held on high, and forthwith a light is thrown on the whole region round, and we see a multitude of objects which else would be lost in the distance or the darkness.

Among other matters, the poems of Chaucer are full