Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Author:Geoffrey Chaucer General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1894 Original Publisher: J.M. Dent Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Literary Criticism / Medieval Poetry / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Study Aids / Book Notes Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It h... more »as no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: Section TIL RELIGION. -- THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS. we regard simply the period of Chauccr, undoubtedly the j -tg most peculiar feature of the age was that one upon which we have dilated to some length, Chivalry; for, as it had notlongbeforesprungintoimportance, soitdidnotnotice- ably last long after ; its influences were almost as brief as they were brilliant ; and but for the pages of those, who by a remarkable coincidence lived during its palmiest days, and chronicled the events and the actors of that graceful and imaginative system of bloodshedding in its own spirit -- but for Froissartand Chaucer, chivalry would indeed have become to us of the present day an utterly effete thing. But there was a sweet savour of humanity beneath the scheme so elaborately developed for the destruction of all the best human interests, however little business it had there ; and the historian and the poet saw it, and have in consequence taken care that the world to the end of time shall see it too. Could they have given us a finer moral? -- If our common nature can be so noble, exhibit so much grace, beauty, and self-denial, under circumstances of all others the most adverse to the development of those qualities, what, let us ask ourselves, may it not become, whenever we shall surround it by influences that shall be of all others the most favourable ? Chivalry, then, was undoubtedly the peculiarly characteristic fea...« less