owes his fame and rank as the first poet of modern English literature, and in this work-the result of years of labour and studythe genius and power of the poet are most strongly expressed.

The Canterbury Tales are a collection of stories related by certain pilgrims who rode together in true English fellowship to worship and pay their vows at the shrine of the 'holy and blisful (blessed) martyr Thomas à Becket.'

The first hint of thus joining together a number of stories by one common bond was probably borrowed from Boccaccio's Decameron d; but Chaucer's plan was far better than that of the Decameron, and looked to a much greater result.... Boccaccio, who died twenty-five years before Chaucer, placed the scene of his Decameron in a garden, to which seven fashionable ladies had retired with three fashionable gentlemen, during the plague that devastated Florence in 1348. The persons were all of the same class, young and rich, with no concern in life beyond the bandying of compliments. They shut themselves up in a delicious garden of the sort common in courtly inventions of the middle ages, and were occupied in sitting about idly, telling stories to each other. The tales were usually dissolute, often witty, sometimes exquisitely poetical, and always told in simple charming prose. The purpose of the story-tellers was to help each other to forget the duties on which they had turned their backs, and stifle any sympathies they might have had for the terrible griefs of their friends and neighbours who were dying a few miles away. Chaucer

two parts, the first part of 4,070 lines by Guillaume de Louis (1200-1230), and the Sequel of 18,002 lines by Jean de Meung, written nearly half a century later; The Assembly of Fowls, or the Parliament of Birds (1358); The Complaint of the Black Knight (about 1359); Chaucer's A B C translated out of Guillaume de Guilevile's 'Pelerinage de l'Homme' written about 1330; Chaucer's Dream (about 1359); The Book of the Duchess (1369); Troylus and Criseyde, an enlarged version of Boccaccio's Filostrato written 1347-8; The Complaint of Marsand Venus, translated from Granss on; The Flower and the Leaf (1387); The House of Fame; The Legend of Good Woman; The Tale of Palamon and Arcite; The Cuckoo and the Nightingale; The Testament of Love (1388); and A Treatise on the Astrolabe (1391).

d Mr. Wright thinks that the widespread Romance of the Seven Sages,' of which there are several English vions, gave Chaucer the idea of his plot.

substituted for the courtly Italian ladies and gentlemen who withdrew from fellowship with the world, as large a group as he could form of English people, of rank widely differing, in hearty human fellowship together. Instead of setting them down to lounge in a garden, he mounted them on horseback, set them on the high road, and gave them somewhere to go and something to do. The bond of fellowship was not fashionable acquaintance and a common selfishness. It was religion; not indeed in a form so solemn as to make laughter and jest unseemly, yet according to the custom of the day, a popular form of religion, the pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas à Becket, into which men entered with much heartiness. It happened to be a custom which had one of the best uses of religion, in serving as a bond of fellowship in which conventional divisions of rank were for a time disregarded; partly because of the sense, more or less joined to religious exercise of any sort, that men are equal before God, and also, in no slight degree, because men of all ranks trotting upon the high-road with chance companions whom they might never see again, have been in all generations disposed to put off restraint, and enjoy such intercourse as might relieve the tediousness of travel ".'

It would take up too much space to enter upon any analysis of the several stories which make up this wonderful collection. It will suffice to consider briefly such portions of the Canterbury Tales as are included in this volume of Selections; and first in order and importance comes the Prologue, in which we have laid before us the general plan, and the several characters of the whole work.

In the pleasant season of April f, as Chaucer lay at the Tabard, one of the chief houses of public entertainment, situated in the High Street of Southwark, nine-and-twenty pilgrims on their way to Canterbury arrived at the 'hostelry.' The poet being on the same errand as themselves, joined them, and in a short time was on intimate and friendly terms with each member of the company. e Morley's English Writers, from Chaucer to Dunbar, vol. ii. pp. 287, 288.

f Elsewhere a date is given, the 28th of April, corresponding to the 7th of May.

b

The host of the inn, 'Harry Bailly,' made one more, and presided over this 'merry company' during their journey to and from Canterbury. At his suggestion it was agreed that each pilgrim should tell two tales on their road to Becket's shrine, and two other tales on the way home; but as the number of the pilgrims was thirty-two, and there are only twenty-four stories, it is evident that more than half the tales are wanting, which may be accounted for by supposing that Chaucer died before the completion of his work, or even before he had settled upon the exact arrangement of the several tales.

'After a brief introduction, filled with the most cheerful images of spring, the season of the pilgrimage, the poet commences the narrative with a description of the person and the character of each member of the party. This description extends to about seven hundred lines, and of course affords space for a very spirited and graphic portrayal of the physical aspect, and an outline of the moral features of each. This latter part of the description is generally more rapidly sketched, because it was a part of the author's plan to allow his personages to bring out their special traits of character, and thus to depict and individualize themselves, in the interludes between the tales. The selection of the pilgrims is evidently made with reference to this object of development in action, and therefore constitutes an essential feature of the plot. We have persons of all the ranks not too far removed from each other by artificial distinctions to be supposed capable of associating upon that footing of temporary equality which is the law of good fellowship, among travellers bound on the same journey and accidentally brought together. All the great classes of English humanity are thus represented, and opportunity is given for the display of the harmonies and the jealousies which now united, now divided the interests of the different orders and different vocations in the commonwealth. The clerical pilgrims, it will be observed, are proportionately very numerous. The exposure of the corruptions of the Church was doubtless

The canon and his yeoman joined them at Boughton-under-Blean, seven miles on the London side of Canterbury; but the master's doings being exposed by his servant, he was glad to ride away 'for very sorrow and shame.'

a leading aim with the poet; and if the whole series, which was designed to extend to at least fifty-eight tales, had been completed, criminations and recriminations of the jealous ecclesiastics would have exhibited the whole profession in an unenviable light.

'But Chaucer could be just as well as severe. His portrait of the prioress, though it does not spare the affectations of the lady, is complimentary; and his “good man of religion,” the “ "pore Persoun of a toun," of whom it is said that

"Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve

He taught, and ferst he folwed it himselve,"

has been hundreds of times quoted as one of the most beautiful pictures of charity, humility, and generous, conscientious, intelligent devotion to the duties of the clerical calling, which can be found in the whole range of English literature.

'None of these sketches, I believe, has ever been traced to a foreign source, and they are so thoroughly national that it is hardly possible to suppose that any imagination but that of an Englishman could have conceived them. In the first introduction of the individuals described in the prologues to the several stories, and in the dialogues which occur at the pauses between the tales, wherever, in short, the narrators appear in their own persons, the characters are as well marked and discriminated, and as harmonious and consistent in action, as in the best comedies of modern times. Although, therefore, there is in the plan of the composition nothing of technical dramatic form or incident, yet the admirable conception of character, the consummate skill with which each is sustained and developed, and the nature, life, and spirit of the dialogue, abundantly prove that if the drama had been known in Chaucer's time as a branch of living literature, he might have attained to as high excellence in comedy as an English or Continental writer. The story of a comedy is but a contrivance to bring the characters into contact and relation with each other, and the invention of a suitable plot is a matter altogether too simple to have created the slightest difficulty to a mind like Chaucer's. He is essentially a dramatist; and if his great work does not appear in the conventional dramatic form, it is an

accident of the time, and by no means proves a want of power of original conception or of artistic skill in the author.

'This is a point of interest in the history of modern literature, because it is probably the first instance of the exhibition of unquestionable dramatic genius in either the Gothic or the Romance languages. I do not mean that there had previously existed in modern Europe nothing like histrionic representation of real or imaginary events; but neither the Decameron of Boccaccio, to which the Canterbury Tales have been compared, nor any of the Mysteries and Moralities, or other imaginative works of the middle ages, in which several personages are introduced, show any such power of conceiving and sustaining individual character as to prove that its author could have furnished the personnel of a respectable play. Chaucer therefore may fairly be said to be not only the earliest dramatic genius of modern Europe, but to have been a dramatist before that which is technically known as the existing drama was invented h'

The Knightes Tale, or at least a poem upon the same subject, was originally composed by Chaucer as a separate work. As such it is mentioned by him, among some of his other works, in the Legende of Goode Women (ll. 420, 1), under the title of 'Al the Love of Palamon and Arcite of Thebes, thogh the storye ys knowen lyte;' and the last words seem to imply that it had not made itself very popular. It is not impossible that at first it was a mere translation of the Teseide of Boccaccio, and that its present form was given it when Chaucer determined to assign it the first place among his Canterbury Tales i.

It may not be unpleasing to the reader to see a short summary

b Marsh, Origin and History of the English Language, pp. 417-419. iThe Knight's Tale is an abridged translation of a part of Boccaccio's Teseide, but with considerable change in the plan, which is, perhaps, not much improved, and with important additions in the descriptive and the more imaginative portions of the story. These additions are not inferior to the finest parts of Boccaccio's work; and one of them, the description of the temple of Mars, is particularly interesting, as proving that Chaucer possessed a power of treating the grand and terrible, of which no modern poet but Dante had yet given an example.' (Marsh, Origin and History of the English Language, pp. 423, 424.)