of necessity prove either quite identical or freely interchangeable. In Chaucer we encounter no stranger: we recognise old familiar faces in his modes of speech; he is full of the idiom, not only of the English tongue, but of the English character.

CONCERNING the fable' (to speak technically) of the Canterbury Tales, a few of the observations of some of Chaucer's biographers do not seem to me well founded or appropriate. There appears to be no reason for saying that the work was written in imitation of the Decameron of Boccaccio, except that critics are rather too fond of discovering that one author has imitated

another, as if similar, and often identical thoughts were not certain in the nature of things to occur to different people, whether in the sphere of science proper or imagination proper! It is, indeed, absolutely certain that similar, and as nearly as possible identical combinations of ideas pass through the minds of tens of thousands of human beings every hour of the day. If we suppose any given number of persons of imagination existing in England in the year 1868, the same topics, with similar modes of treatment, will occur to a certain portion of them who most resemble each other. But as there are differences between them as well as resemblances, they will not all of them treat, in public, the same topics in the same way; though it is easy for the critical reader, who knows an idea in profile, or in shadow, as well as in full face or in the light, to discover the similarity of the trains of thought which have been passing through the minds of the similar people. Nor

Such

is it beyond the reach of the psychology of literature to trace the sinuosities and breakings off in the treatment by differing yet similar minds of similar topics. minds are like travellers setting out upon a journey from nearly adjoining places to other nearly adjoining places. A bird's-eye view shows you whence they come and whither they are going. One takes the highroad, one takes a bridle-road, a third takes a rural short cut through the valleys, while a fourth climbs the hills. But in fact there is no such similarity between the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales as to call for even this kind

of criticism.

Boccaccio makes a number of ladies and gentlemen run away from the plague to a country house, and there, among arbours, fountains, birds, and other such pretty things, tell tales to each other, in order that they may forget the misery which the very sunshine they are enjoying at peace lights up not far off. The whole conception is evidently medieval-Italian, — cowardly, romantic, and thin. The treatment is artificial and bald, so far as the framework or fable' is concerned. What can be poorer or more theatrical than all this twaddle about the birds, the trees, and the sunshine? It needs not to say that many of the stories have exceeding merit; and some of them, to which Chaucer's tales run parallel, are told with a grace, and above all, with a snaky Italian finesse, which, of course, we do not find in Chaucer. But it is in the framework of his Canterbury Tales that Chaucer is by universal consent at his best. In the first place, an English poet of the fourteenth century did not need to travel far for so very obvious and natural an idea as that of making wayfarers amuse each other by the telling of stories. In the second place, Chaucer's 'fable' is thoroughly English, and widely different from that of the Decameron. Its Englishness we recognise at a glance,—the inn, the company, the good fellowship, the common purpose (so different from mere running away or retirement), the straightforward look of the pilgrims in the poet's picture,—all this is, I repeat, thoroughly English, and as peculiar to Chaucer as anything English can be. It

would be as reasonable to say that Boccaccio imitated the Arabian Nights, as it is to say that Chaucer imitated Boccaccio.

II. Whether Chaucer knew the Tabard very intimately or not it is impossible to affirm. Of course, it is probable, to the very verge of certainty, that he did, and that the guests whom he assembled there were portraits in whole or in part. It is idle to be too confident in drawing conclusions from those intimacies of description and narrative which come so naturally to the pen of a man of genius; and Nature may very well have taught Chaucer what she taught Defoe, namely, that the way to make a description truth-like is to introduce touches which an ordinary person would not think of introducing unless they were true and had turned up naturally. Why, in the name of wonder, should Chaucer go out of his way to say that the Wife of Bath was 'gattothed,' unless she was 'gattothed,' and he had seen her? or that the Reeve was a sklendre colerik man,' with 'ful longe leggus?' or that the Pardoner had 'glaryng eyghen as an hare,' and a 'voys as smale as eny goot?' or that the Monk had 'eyen steep and rollyng in his heed?' These are a few of the lifelike touches which have helped to make the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales one of the best known compositions in the English language, in spite of its antiquated English and the rough, and sometimes worse than rough narratives to which it forms the introduction.