ABSTRACT
The great quality of Chaucer’s humour is its fair play; – the truth and humanity which induces him to see justice done to good and bad, to the circumstances which make men what they are, and the mixture of right and wrong, of wisdom and of folly, which they consequently exhibit. His worst characters have some little saving grace of good-nature, or at least of joviality and candour. Even the Pardoner, however impudently, acknowledges himself to be a ‘vicious man.’ Chaucer’s comic genius is so perfect, that it may be said to include prophetic intimations of all that followed it. The liberal-thinking joviality of Rabelais is there; the portraiture of Cervantes, moral and external; the poetry of Shakspeare; the learning of Ben Jonson; the manners of the wits of Charles the Second; the bonhomie of Sterne; and the insidiousness, without the malice, of Voltaire.
