life, and death. He was of a spiritual nature. The contrast of his poor serviceable clerks and priests with the wastrels of religion show how clearly he dis tinguished the true from the false, and how thoroughly he detested the licensed charlatan. It is not without significance, in the days of Wycliffe, that Chaucer's most spiritual cleric, the poor Parson, was, according to Harry Bailey the Host, a Lollard. I smell a Loller in the wind!' An extraordinarily serious person that good man proved, for the 'merry tale' he promises turns out to be a very lengthy sermon on Penitence, Contrition, Confession, and the Seven Deadly Sins, quite after the pattern of some soul-searching covenanting Poundtext o on the Scottish hills. With this 'Loller's' earnest words i Chaucer brings to an end his Canterbury Tales, and that is the pity of it, for by then darkness was clouding he the joyous mind and heart.

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His last years were shadowed with anxieties and bla grief. He was poor. He addressed lines to his purse,h) begging it to be heavy again or else he must die; but at worse than the threat of worldly evil was the fear of the pains post-mortem, when this game of life is done and the Judgment falls 'at the great Assize,' as he calls it in Troilus.' He trembled before the dark unknown. This was made very plain in the 'Preces' to the Canter- tic bury Tales, where-worked upon by dread of the future and the deep thoughts which his own sermon had roused; remembering, too, the contrast of present de privation and anxieties, with the abundance and magnificence of the days at court-he groped among fears and doubts. And so, in the evening of his life, which had come near to the night, he lamented over the happy things he had written; as if, forsooth, they were deadly sins.

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"That God have mercy on me and forgive me my guilts, and namely of my translations and enditing in worldly vanities, which I revoke in my retractions as in the book of Troilus, the book also of Fame, the book of twenty-five ladies, the book of the Duchesses, the book of St. Valentine's Day and of the Parliament of Birds, the Tales of Canterbur all this that sounen (tendeth) unto sin, the book of the Lea and many other books, if they were in my mind or remem brance, and many a song and many a lecherous lay. . . .'

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He goes on to take consolation-'so that I might be one of them at the day of doom that shall be saved '—in his translation of Boethius, of his legends of the saints, homilies, moralities, and books of devotion-things forgotten, writings happily forgotten; for what are the blessings given by such mumblings and ramblings of superstition and ritual compared with the joy, laughter, and simple helpful kindness and seriousness of his lay works, with the songs of the birds at their mating, the glory of the flowers and woods, the glimpses of fairies dancing, of princes and knights in congress, the sadness and delight of lovers, the passion of Troilus and the grief of Cressida, the gossiping wonder of the Canterbury Pilgrims, those English folk, gentle and simple, riding through the lanes and meadows of Kent?

The medieval Church has much to answer for when so pleasant a spirit as that of Chaucer was frightened into black penitence because of the triumphs of his pen, which had rejoiced many and were further to rejoice generations to come. For his was a gentle spirit, and one the world has learnt to love. Chaucer went quietly through life, sharing the sorrows of his fellows and joining their mirth in the ways of human brotherhood, watching with amused eyes the ardours and vanities of ambition and romantic love, contrasting with all that splendour and clamour and pride the simplicity of the daisies starring the grass at his feet.

Art. 7.-THE RETURN OF THE TURKS.

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FROM the peace of Karlovitz in 1699 to the autumn oferta 1922 the Turkish dominions in Europe had gradually diminished. The 19th century, which witnessed the liberation of Serbia, Greece, and Roumania, and the practical fe independence of Bulgaria, marked the decline of the Ottoman Empire in a continent where it had always been a stranger. The first Balkan war of the present century almost entirely eliminated the Turkish flag from the Balkan peninsula, and the treaty of Sèvres in 1920 restricted European Turkey to the capital and the tiny slip of territory which stretches as far as the Chatalja lines. The European possessions of Turkey were very much what those of the Byzantine Empire had been just before the capture of Constantinople, and it seemed as if the time were at hand when the Turks would recross the Bosphorus and return to the continent, whence they came in the middle of the 14th century. Then arose the of 'National' movement at Angora, of which Mustaphaer Kemal had made himself head; in March 1922, the Paris Conference (on paper) restored Smyrna and its Hinterland to direct Turkish rule and extended the frontiers of r European Turkey to a line drawn from near Ganos on a the sea of Marmara to the Bulgarian frontier on the west of the Stranja Mountains. Six months later the victories of the Turks over a demoralised Greek army drove the Greeks out of Smyrna and so greatly alarmed diplomacy that it made further concessions, by which in the Mudania Convention of Oct. 11, 1922, and at the Conference of Lausanne, the Turkish frontier was further advanced to the Maritza. Thus, the clock had been set back, and the Turks have returned to Eastern Thrace, one of the granaries of Greece. Some writers, arguing superficially and without due perspective, see in this retrograde movement the sign of a great Turkish revival. But, to quote the words of Prof. Freeman* over forty years ago, we see in it a transitional state of things, which diplomacy fondly hopes to be an eternal settlement of an eternal question; but of which reason and

* 'The Historical Geography of Europe' (Ed. 1), 1, 460.

history can say only that we know not what a day may bring forth.' The Greek defeat of 1897 caused the loss of certain strategic points in Thessaly; but it was com-pletely wiped out by the crushing defeat of the Turks in 1912. Only on this present occasion, the Powers, in their fear of war, have ignored Lord Salisbury's maxim, that Christian territory once wrested from the Turks must not be restored to them. Lord Salisbury was no Crusader; but he was a man of great historic insight and common sense, who knew that the Turks, although good fighters, were poor administrators, unable, as their whole history shows, to govern subject Christian populations. Unfortunately, nowadays there is no European statesman of the moral force of Gladstone or Lord Salisbury, while of the Allied Ministers, Signor Mussolini, while admitting an extension of Turkish territory, alone had the courage to tell the Turks that there was a limit, beyond which they must not go. Once more, as in the days of Abdul Hamid II, the Turks have played off one Power against another, and thus, having defeated the Greeks in the field, have defeated the Powers at the Council-table. Yet surely the experience of half a century should have taught us that at palaver the Turks can easily outwit Europeans; past-masters in the art of procrastination, they can spin out discussions indefinitely, unless they are brought face to face with the only argument which Orientals understand and respectforce. They knew full well, however, that this was the one argument that the Powers would not apply. For, at so short a distance from the terrible carnage and expense of the world-war, no European nation wanted a fresh appeal to arms. Besides, France and, to a less extent, Italy had been pursuing a Turkophil policy. Italy, since the occupation of the Dodekanese in 1912, had been opposed to Greece, especially since the Kakavia incident and the bombardment of Corfu; Great Britain, and still more France, had been opposed to King Constantine. Mr Lloyd George, indeed, probably under the influence of his personal friend, Sir John Stavridi, formerly Greek Consul-General in London, warmly espoused the cause of the Greeks. But he was alone in the Cabinet in his enthusiasm for them, and his famous speech of Aug. 4, 1922, injured, rather than helped them

and made him partly responsible for what has occurred. 'Moral sympathy,' unaccompanied by material support, is of little use in the day of battle. And material support public opinion in Great Britain would not have allowed the Premier to give. For he had against him not only the Anglo-Indians, whose fathers had opposed Gladstone in 1877, but also the Labour party and not a few Liberals, anxious to avoid war at any cost. Moreover, had Great Britain gone to war in the unpopular cause as it was represented-of King Constantine, she would have fought alone, for neither France nor Italy would have joined her.

What are the causes of this temporary-for history shows that it will be only temporary-turn of the Turkish tide? First the defeat of M. Venizelos in the elections of November 1920. Before that event, Greece had alike in Great Britain and France an enormous number of friends, who supported her, not because they were Philhellenes but because they admired and trusted M. Venizelos. As Mr Lloyd George once said, 'owing to Constantine all my colleagues are against me.' All the declarations of Constantine's admirers could not efface the impression made by his telegrams published in the Greek White Book. Secondly, there was the French evacuation of Cilicia, which not only diminished European prestige in the eyes of the Turks, but also provided them with weapons; for the retiring French left a large amount of arms and munitions behind them. Had the Allies before the peace given the Turks a knockdown blow, these things would not have had such influence, for at that time the fatalist Turks would have accepted their humiliation as kismet, and even the restoration of Santa Sophia to Christendom would have been endured. But the Powers, occupied in the West, allowed the psychological moment to pass; the Turks recovered selfconfidence and found a leader; while they became more recalcitrant, the Allies became less united; and the world was treated to the unedifying spectacle of a British Minister of Foreign Affairs and ex-Viceroy of India waiting at Lausanne upon the good pleasure of a Turkish Pasha for over two months, while his presence was urgently needed in London! It was no wonder that the Turks should have felt elated and that Angora