English Literature.

The lecture by E. Charlton Black on English Literature last evening lent itself much more readily to the popular mind than the more elementary lectures.

The Normans had no unity of feeling with the Anglo-Saxons whom they conquered. They had the lightness of touch and sensitiveness of feeling that characterize the Celts, but, while the Celts gave voice only to their own feelings, the Normans had a mighty interest in the world about them, delighted to describe it and the events that took place within it. Their literature, whether historic satirical, didactic, or romantic, was all on the epic basis, tinged with fantastic imagination.

There was no relation whatsoever between the Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and Celtic literatures except the relation that was necessitated by geography. Yet out of the mixture of these three, there was produced a tongue, fitted by its strength and scope of expression to be the instrument of the greatest of modern literatures. England was much influenced by foreign thought form the time of the conquest; especially the laiety, who had been wofully lacking in all education, now gained some appreciation for refinement and culture of mind.

The tongue and the nation were ready for great poets. The first two of these were Langley and Chaucer.

Langley was educated for the church, and lived his whole life as an inferior ecclesiastic. He was extremely poor, extremely proud, and exceedingly wroth at the wickedness of the world. His one work, "Piers the Ploughman" is a keen and daring satire on the state of society and religion in England, full of merciless sarcasm and incisive irony in the dissoluteness of the clergy and the vanity of all men.

As a literary production, it has not much merit. There is little method and the art is rough. It paints vividly any grotesque character, but fails at the quiet or gentle. It has no cohereucr, and no consummation, - like many pictures arranged by mere chance.

To him Chaucer was a marked contrast. Langley was a novelist, Chaucer an artist. His nature was sunny and genial, he was satisfied to take things as they were, and try to describe not to better them. He was a man of facts; not only was he an eager student, and a prodigious reader, but an accomplished man of the world. He had the best education England afforded, he paid a visit to Italy, and shared in the active life of English politics.

Besides these acquired powers, Chaucer was born with the nature of a pure poet. His love for nature was intense and almost childish, and his eye caught the beautiful always, whether in nature or in man. He taught himself the art of self-criticism, of which earlier poets were ignorant. This gave his writings the double power both of nature and art. Though drama was not then recognized, yet we cannot fail to mark the dramatic instinct of which he was possessed. In all the essentials of genius, - in inheritance, in acquired qualities, and in fitting circumstances - Chaucer was complete. He was the father of English literature.