The famous portion of Chaucer's Miscellaneous Volume has been fortunate in the editorial cares of TYRWHIT. Tyrwhit, a scholar as well as an antiquary, was an expert philologer; his extensive reading in the lore of our vernacular literature and our national antiquities promptly supplied what could not have entered into his more classical studies; and his sagacity seems to have decided on the various readings of all the manuscripts, by piercing into the core of the poet's thoughts.[8]
It is remarkable that some of the most lively productions of several great writers have been the work of their maturest age. Johnson surpassed all his preceding labours in his last work, the popular Lives of the Poets. The "Canterbury Tales" of Chaucer were the effusions of his advanced age, and the congenial verses of Dryden were thrown out in the luxuriance of his later days. Milton might have been classed among the minor poets had he not lived to be old enough to become the most sublime. Let it be a source of consolation, if not of triumph, in a long studious life of true genius, to know that the imagination may not decline with the vigour of the frame which holds it; there has been no old age for many men of genius.
We must lament that at such an early period in our vernacular literature, we have to record that the two fathers of our poetry, congenial spirits as they were, too closely resembled most of their sons--in one of the most painful infirmities of genius. I have said elsewhere that jealousy, long supposed to be the offspring of little minds, is not, however, confined to them. We do not possess the secret history of the two great poets, Chaucer and Gower; but we are told by Berthelet in his edition of Gower's "Confessio Amantis," when he quotes the commendatory lines on Gower by Chaucer, that the poets "were both excellently learned, _both great friendes together_." Ancient biographers usually fall into this vague style of eulogy, which served their purpose rather than a more critical research. True it is that "they were both great friends," but, what Berthelet has not told, they became also "both great enemies." We know that Chaucer has commemorated the dignified merits of "the moral Gower," and that Gower has poured forth an effusion not less fervid than elegant from the lips of Venus, who calls Chaucer "her own clerk, who in the flower of his youth had made ditees and songes glad which have filled the land." Did this little passion of poetic jealousy creep into their great souls? Else how did it happen that Chaucer, who had once solicited the correcting hand of his friend, in his latest work, reprehended the sage and the poet, and that Gower, who had not stinted the rich meed of his eulogy which appeared in the first copies of his "Confessio Amantis," erased the immortality which he had bestowed. The justice of their reciprocal praise neither of these rivals could efface, for that outlives their little jealousies.