disciple Occleve, which is preserved in the margin of a MS. of the De Regimine Principum of that writer (Harleian MS. 4,866). It was drawn when the poet was no longer young, for the beard (which is bi-forked) and the hair are gray; but it accords generally, by the downcast eyes and other characteristics, with the Host's account of the reserved and portly stranger, who looked upon the ground as though he would 'find a hare,' and who seemed

'-Elvisch (weird) by his countenaunce,

For unto no wight doth he daliaunce.' *

To the Host's picture, some of the poet's critics would add (and apparently without any great straining of probability), as applicable to Chaucer himself, the following lines from his description of the Clerk of Oxenford in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales:

'For him was lever have at his beddes heede
Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reede,
Of Aristotle and his philosophie,

Then robes riche, or fithel, or gay sawtrie.
But al be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre; ...
Of studie took he most cure and most heede.
Not oo word spak he more than was neede,
And that was seid in forme and reverence

And schort and quyk, and ful of high sentence.
Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche,

And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.'

Chaucer's latest and greatest work was the Canterbury Tales. His earlier and minor poems are mostly translations; but not the less original on that account. 'It was not the subject treated,' says Mr. Lowell, but himself, that was the new thing.'t Of these minor poems, however, so many hitherto ascribed to him are regarded by Mr. Henry Bradshaw ‡ and other high authorities as doubtful (on account of their departures from the rules of rhyme observed in his remaining authentic works), that it is necessary to speak with extreme caution in giving them as his. But three, at least, are placed beyond suspicion by his express reference to them in a fourth, which has never been contested. In the Legend of Good Women (or Seyntes Legendes of Cupide) he says of himself:

'He made the book that hight the [1] Hous of Fame,

And eke the [2] Deeth of Blaunchë the Duchesse

And the [3] Parlement of Foules, as I gesse.'

* Prologue to Rime of Sir Thopas; Canterbury Tales.

t My Study Windows: Chaucer.

Librarian of the University of Cambridge, and one of the most eminent of Chaucer students.

It will, however, be best to give the titles of all the principal minor works attributed to him, laying stress only upon those of which the genuineness is not disputed :

1. The Romaunt of the Rose, is a translation, in 7,700 lines, from the Roman de la Rose written between 1200 and 1280 by the trouvères Guillaume de Lorris and his continuator, Jean de Meung. Chaucer refers, in his Legend of Good Women, to a version of this work from his hand; but it is more than doubtful if the one usually ascribed to him be really his.

2. The Court of Love, doubtful. This is the poem containing reference (see ante, p. 33) to the writer's residence at Cambridge:'Philogenet I cald am, fer and nere, Of Cambrige clerke.'

3. The Assembly, or Parlement of Foules, which celebrates the courtship of Henry of Lancaster's daughter Blanche by Chaucer's protector, John of Gaunt, whom she married in 1359.

4. The Complaint of a Loveres Lyfe, or the Black Knight, now ascribed to Lydgate (see p. 41, s. 19).

5. Chaucer's Dream, doubtful.

6. The Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse, a poem on the death of John of Gaunt's wife in 1369.

7. Troylus and Criseyde, an enlarged English version of the Filostrato of Giovanni Boccacio (1313-1375 in five books. The licentiousness of the original is considerably modified, the personages are more elevated, and the atmosphere is altogether healthier. In this excellent book,' says the quaint summary of one of Chaucer's older editors, 'is shewn the fervent love of Troilus to Creseida, whom he enjoyed for a time, and her great untruth to him again in giving herself to Diomedes, who in the end did so cast her off that she came to great misery. In which discourse Chaucer liberally treateth of the divine purveyance.'

8. The Hous of Fame, in three books. The poet is carried by an eagle to the Houses of Fame and Rumour, which are described with true mediæval magnificence.

9. The Legende of Good Women, incomplete, suggested by Boccacio's De Claris Mulieribus, and to which Chaucer himself refers as ' a glorious legende

of goode wymmen, maydenës and wyves
That weren trewe in lovying all hire lyves.'

The collection includes the stories of Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido,
Hypsipyle and Medea, Lucretia, Ariadne, Philomela, Phyllis, and
Hypermnestra.

10. The Flower and the Leaf, paraphrased by Dryden, doubtful. 11. The Boke of Cupide, or the Cuckow and the Nightingale, doubtful.

[The principal remaining works of the author of the Canterbury Tales are in prose.]

12. Translation of Boethius de Consolatione Philosophiæ, referred to in the Legende of Good Women (‘He hath in prosë translated Boece'), in five books.

13. The Testament of Love, doubtful.

14. The Conclusions of the Astrolabie (Astrolabe), an unfinished treatise addressed to his son Lewis circa 1391.

The Canterbury Tales, which open a new era in,—or rather inaugurate, modern English Literature, were not written till after 1386. They may be broadly dated at 1390. The main idea of connecting a variety of tales by a common thread was probably suggested by Boccacio's Decameron. In Boccacio's work the tales are told by ten fashionable fugitives from Florence, who, during the 'Black Death' of 1348, have sought an asylum in a country villa. The plan of Chaucer is much more pleasing and natural, besides allowing far larger scope. His tale-tellers are a number of pilgrims, selected from all classes of society, but united by a common object-a pilgrimage to the shrine of 'the holy blisful martir,' St. Thomas à Becket, at Canterbury. To this end they have assembled, in the month of April, at the 'Old Tabard Inn,' Southwark, which, previous to its destruction by fire in 1676, stood on the site of the more modern building of the same name in the Borough High Street, now (1873) shortly to be sold, and probably pulled down. The pilgrims are Chaucer himself (1), a Knight (2), a Squire, his son (3), a Miller (4), a Reeve or Steward (5), and a Cook (6); a Sergeant of Law (7), a Shipman or Mariner (8), a Prioress (9), a Nun's Priest (10), a Monk (11), a Doctor of Physic (12), a Pardoner or Seller of Indulgences (13), a Wife of Bath (14), a Friar (15), a Summoner to the Ecclesiastical Courts (16), a Clerk of Oxford (17), a Merchant (18), a Nun (19), a Franklin or Freeholder (20), a Manciple or Victualler (21), a Poor Parson (22), and a Canon's Yeoman (23), who joins the cavalcade at Boughton-under-Blean, seven miles from Canterbury. Tales by all these are preserved. But besides these there are the Knight's Yeoman (24), other Priests (25, 26), a Haberdasher (27), a Carpenter (28), a Weaver (29), a Dyer (30), a Tapestry Maker (31), a Ploughman (32), and Harry Bailly (33), the Host of the 'Tabard,' whose tales, if written, do t remain to us.

How wide a range of society and how great a variety of portraiture his scheme afforded to the poet, the preceding list will show. The vigour and originality with which he has sketched his characters, and the skill with which, in the several links of the subsequent tales, they are made to unfold their personality,* place him, at one bound, far beyond the painstaking, plain-sailing chroniclers and translators, his predecessors and contemporaries. It was an excursion into the delineation of real life such as they, trammelled by convention and tradition, had never contemplated. The following quotation will testify how naturally the device for telling the stories originates. The Host, of whom we are told that he was—

'A semely man

For to han been a marschal in an halle;

A large man he was with eyghen stepe,

A fairere burgeys was there noon in Chepe,'

mirthful at the goodly company assembled, after remarking that '-trewely comfort ne mirthe is noon

To ryde by the weye domb as a stoon [stone],'

announces that he has a proposal to make to them if they will fall in with it. They assent:

"Lordynges," quoth he, "now herkneth for the beste;

But taketh it not, I praye you, in disdayn;

This is the poynt, to speken schort and playn,

That ech of yow to schorte with youre weie

In this viage, schal telle tales tweye,

To Caunterburi-ward, I mene it so,

And hom-ward he schal tellen othere tuo,

Of aventures that whilom han bifalle.

And which of yow that bereth him best of alle,
That is to seyn, that telleth in this caas
Tales of best sentence and most solas,

Schal han a soper at youre alther cost
Here in this place sittynge by this post,
Whan that we come ageyn from Canturbury.
And for to maken you the more mery,

I wol myselven gladly with you ryde,

Right at my owen cost, and be your gyde.

And whoso wole my juggement withseie

Schal paye al that we spenden by the weye."'†

The guests then draw lots as to who shall begin.

The duty

devolves upon the Knight, who leads off with a tale of chivalry. The drunken Miller,-you may know it by his soun,'-breaks in next with a characteristically coarse story; the Reeve follows, and

*See Appendix A, Extract XV.

Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.

Th

the others in their turn tell tales suited to their respective ranks and avocations.* There are only twenty-four tales, and it will be evident from the outline of the Host, that a much larger number would be required to complete his plan. In all probability, death overtook the poet at the work which he had designed as the labour of his old age.

Still, unfinished though they be, the Canterbury Tales stand out prominently in English literature. As there had been nothing like them before they were written, so for years after there was nothing to compare with them. Indeed, Shakespeare excepted, no other poet has yet arisen to rival the author of the Canterbury Tales in the entire assemblage of his various powers. Spenser's is a more aërial, Milton's a loftier, song; but neither possesses the wonderful combination of contrasted and almost opposite characteristics which we have in Chaucer: the sportive fancy, painting and gilding everything, with the keen, observant, matter-of-fact spirit that looks through whatever it glances at; the soaring and creative imagination, with the homely sagacity, and healthy relish for all the realities of things; the unrivalled tenderness and pathos, with the quaintest humour and the most exuberant merriment; the wisdom at once, and the wit; the all that is best, in short, both in poetry and prose, at the same time.' The same writer further says that in none of our poetry is there either a more abounding or a more bounding spirit of life, a truer or fuller natural inspiration. He [Chaucer] may be said to verify, in another sense, the remark of Bacon, that what we commonly call antiquity was really the youth of the world: his poetry seems to breathe of a time when humanity was younger and more joyous-hearted than it now is.'

As compared with that of Langland, the language of Chaucer is of the court and city rather than of the provinces. His dialect

is mainly the East Midland, and this he may be said to have made national, giving it at once 'in compass, flexibility, expressiveness, grace, and all the higher qualities of poetical diction . . . . the utmost perfection which the materials at his hand would admit of.' ‡ He was, in truth, what his imitator Lydgate styles him :

Into the still debated question of his metre and versification our space will not allow us to enter. Posterity has not endorsed Dryden's

*See Appendix B: Note to the Canterbury Tales.

+ Craik, Eng. Lit. and Language, 1871, i. 313, 291.

Marsh, Lectures on the English Language, 1862, ix. 381; v. also Morris (Clarendon Press Series).

§ Falls of Princes.