Such is the happy position of Homer, perhaps; of Chaucer,
of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are librarians
and historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was heir and
dispenser of all the hundred tales of the world,--
"Presenting Thebes' and Pelops' line
And the tale of Troy divine."
The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature;
and, more recently, not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to
him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large
unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence
which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer,
it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from Guido di
Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation
from Dares Phrygius, Ovid, and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and
the Provencal poets, are his benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose is
only judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meun:
Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox,
from the _Lais_ of Marie: The House of Fame, from the French or
Italian: and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or
stone-quarry out of which to build his house.
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