ABSTRACT
Geoffrey Chaucer’s immediate followers, or so we are often told, valued only the poet’s most formal flights of rhetoric, in which they found encouragement for their own peculiar development of the ‘aureate style’. The Scottish Chaucerians, who were, manifestly, not dunces, are usually allowed a more perceptive appreciation of the English poet, although they too are thought to overemphasize the importance of ‘rhetoric’. The writers who praised Chaucer were, thus, not merely representative of a highly specialized and transitory fashion in English literature, nor of narrow interests as far as subject-matter is concerned. ‘Flowers of rhetoric’ can certainly mean the figures and tropes, the ‘colours’ described in the treatises; and, as at any rate the more difficult of these were generally agreed to be only appropriate to the high style, it is likely that mention of them does imply a lofty poetic flight.
