well nine and twenty in a company Of sundry folk,

with their horses and travelling gear sufficient for a ride to Canterbury. The goal of this ride has its religious, its national, one might even say its political aspect; but the journey itself has an importance of its own. A journey is generally one of the best of opportunities for bringing out the distinctive points in the characters of travellers; and we are accustomed to say that no two men can long travel in one another's company unless their friendship is equal to the severest of tests. At home men live mostly among colleagues and comrades; on a journey they are placed in continual contrast with men of different pursuits and different habits of life. The shipman away from his ship, the monk away from his cloister, the scholar away from his books, become interesting instead of remaining commonplace, because the contrasts become marked which exist between them. Moreover, men undertake journeys for divers purposes, and a pilgrimage in Chaucer's day united a motley group of chance companions in search of different ends at the same goal. One goes to pray, the other seeks profit, the third distraction, the fourth pleasure. To some the road is everything; to others, its terminus. All this vanity lay in the mere choice of Chaucer's framework; there was accordingly something of genius in the thought itself; and even an inferior workmanship could hardly have left a description of a Canterbury pilgrimage unproductive of a wide variety of dramatic effects.

But Chaucer's workmanship was as admirable as his selection of his framework was felicitous. He has executed only part of his scheme, according to which each pilgrim was to tell two tales both going and coming, and the best narrator, the laureate of this merry company, was

to be rewarded by a supper at the common expense on their return to their starting-place. Thus the design was, not merely to string together a number of poetical tales by an easy thread, but to give a real unity and completeness to the whole poem. All the tales told by all the pilgrims were to be connected together by links; the reader was to take an interest in the movement and progress of the journey to and fro; and the poem was to have a middle as well as a beginning and an end :-the beginning being the inimitable Prologue as it now stands; the middle the history of the pilgrims' doings at Canterbury; and the close their return and farewell celebration at the Tabard inn. Though Chaucer carried out only about a fourth part of this plan, yet we can see, as clearly as if the whole poem lay before us in a completed form, that its most salient feature was intended to lie in the variety of its characters.

Each of these characters is distinctly marked out in itself, while at the same time it is designed as the type of a class. This very obvious criticism of course most readily admits of being illustrated by the Prologue-a gallery of genre-portraits which many master-hands have essayed to reproduce with pen or with pencil. Indeed one lover of Chaucer sought to do so with both-poor gifted Blake, whose descriptive text of his picture of the Canterbury Pilgrims Charles Lamb, with the loving exaggeration in which he was at times fond of indulging, pronounced the finest criticism on Chaucer's poem he had ever read. But it should be likewise noticed that the character of each pilgrim is kept up through the poem, both incidentally in the connecting passages between tale and tale, and in the manner in which the tales themselves are introduced and told. The con

necting passages are full of dramatic vivacity; in these the Host, Master Harry Bailly, acts as a most efficient choragus, but the other pilgrims are not silent, and in the Manciple's Prologue, the Cook enacts a bit of downright farce for the amusement of the company and of stray inhabitants of "Bob-up-and-down." He is, however, homœopathically cured of the effects of his drunkenness, so that the Host feels justified in offering up a thanksgiving to Bacchus for his powers of conciliation. The Man of Law's Prologue is an argument; the Wife of Bath's the ceaseless clatter of an indomitable tongue. The sturdy Franklin corrects himself when deviating into circumlocution :

Till that the brightë sun had lost his hue,
For th' horizon had reft the sun of light,
(This is as much to say as: it was night).

The Miller "tells his churlish tale in his manner," of which manner the less said the better; while in the Reeve's Tale, Chaucer even, after the manner of a comic dramatist, gives his Northern undergraduate a vulgar ungrammatical phraseology, probably designedly, since the poet was himself a "Southern man." The Pardoner is exuberant in his sample-eloquence; the Doctor of Physic is gravely and sententiously moral

a proper man,

And like a prelate, by Saint Runyan,

says the Host. Most sustained of all, though he tells no tale, is, from the nature of the case, the character of Harry Bailly, the host of the Tabard, himself-who, whatever resemblance he may bear to his actual original, is the ancestor of a long line of descendants, including mine Host of the Garter in the Merry Wives of Windsor. He is a

thorough worldling, to whom anything smacking of the precisian in morals is as offensive as anything of a Romantic tone in literature; he smells a Lollard without fail, and turns up his nose at an old-fashioned ballad or a string of tragic instances as out of date or tedious. In short, he speaks his mind and that of other more timid people at the same time, and is one of those sinners whom everybody both likes and respects. "I advise," says the Pardoner, with polite impudence (when inviting the company to become purchasers of the holy wares which he has for sale), that

our host, he shall begin,

For he is most envelopèd in sin.

He is thus both an admirable picture in himself, and an admirable foil to those characters which are most unlike him-above all to the Parson and the Clerk of Oxford, the representatives of religion and learning.

As to the Tales themselves, Chaucer beyond a doubt meant their style and tone to be above all things popular. This is one of the causes accounting for the favour shown to the work,- -a favour attested, so far as earlier times are concerned, by the vast number of manuscripts existing of it. The Host is, so to speak, charged with the constant injunction of this cardinal principle of popularity as to both theme and style. "Tell us," he coolly demands of the most learned and sedate of all his fellow-travellers,

some merry thing of ádventures;

Your termës, your coloúrs, and your figúres,
Keep them in store, till so be ye indite
High style, as when that men to kingës write;
Speak ye so plain at this time, we you pray,
That we may understandë that ye say.

And the Clerk follows the spirit of the injunction both

by omitting, as impertinent, a proeme in which his original, Petrarch, gives a great deal of valuable, but not in its connexion interesting, geographical information, and by adding a facetious moral to what he calls the "unrestful matter" of his story. Even the Squire, though, after the manner of young men, far more than his elders addicted to the grand style, and accordingly specially praised for his eloquence by the simple Franklin, prefers to reduce to its plain meaning the courtly speech of the Knight of the Brazen Steed. In connexion with what was said above, it is observable that each of the Tales in subject suits its narrator. Not by chance is the all-butQuixotic romance of Palamon and Arcite, taken by Chaucer from Boccaccio's Teseide, related by the Knight; not by chance does the Clerk, following Petrarch's Latin version. of a story related by the same author, tell the even more improbable, but, in the plainness of its moral, infinitely more fructuous tale of patient Griseldis. How well tho Second Nun is fitted with a legend which carries us back a few centuries into the atmosphere of Hrosvitha's comedies, and suggests with the utmost verisimilitude the nature of a nun's lucubrations on the subject of marriage. It is impossible to go through the whole list of the Tales; but all may be truly said to be in keeping with the characters and manners (often equally indifferent) of their tellers— down to that of the Nun's Priest, which, brimful of humour as it is, has just the mild naughtiness about it which comes so drolly from a spiritual director in his worldlier hour.

Not a single one of these Tales can with any show of reason be ascribed to Chaucer's own invention. French literature-chiefly though not solely that of fabliauxdoubtless supplied the larger share of his materials; but