gradually down over a descent of 40 miles toward the sea. A rich loamy tract, admirably adapted for agriculture and cattle grazing, extends along the east coast, while the interior is a true pastoral country, well watered by numerous streams, and covered with a perpetual herbage of various grasses. A vast coalfield seems to underlie the whole country, and coal is worked in the districts of Timaru and Malvern. Good fire-clays, quartz, sand for glassmaking, marble, limestone, etc., are also found. The productions include wool, grain, frozen meat, skins and hides, butter, cheese and some silk. Pop. including Maoris, 173,185.

CANTERBURY-BELL, a name given to species of Campanula (q.v.), especially C. medium.

CANTERBURY

TALES, The. "The Book of the Tales of Canterbury' has a permanent claim on the attention of reading men. It represents the most mature and the most variously brilliant achievement of the man whom the world will always regard, and in many respects rightly, as the father of English poetry. In its structure it is, though uncompleted, the happiest scheme of the many that have been devised for presenting a series of stories in a manner at once natural, dramatic and the reverse of monotonous. In its setting it introduces us to an acquaintance on terms of intimacy with the society, high and low, of merry England's 14th century, an age of color, of contrasts and of essential liveliness. In its contents it offers an inviting approach, for most men probably the readiest, to the literature of the late Middle Ages, a realm of gold for all its dross, whose literary coin still bore, after its own peculiar fashion, some stamp of the antique Roman world and is still current in the world of beauty to-day.

"The Canterbury Tales,' as we know it, is a collection of 24 stories, two of them unfinished and two, for dramatic reasons, interrupted and not continued. These stories are bound together in a scheme, only partly realized, by means of the words of the host, Harry Bailey, toast-master of the occasion; by the talk of the pilgrims - the tellers of the tales-among themselves; and by occasional narrative and descriptive touches on the part of Chaucer, himself a pilgrim and reporter of the whole. Though some of the stories were composed earlier, the writing of many of them and the work of weaving them all into a garland seem to have been the chief literary activity of the last 15 years of the poet's life. For death found him with the work still unfinished.

The plan which the poet proposes at the beginning is characteristically ambitious; characteristically, again, it underwent modifications and adjustments as the work proceeded; this fact, together with the further rearrangements introduced by different copyists, makes it impossible always to speak with certainty of Chaucer's final intention. But enough of the structure emerges to give to the collection as a whole vastly more significance than any one story, or all of them arranged in a manner not so original, could possibly possess. It is perfectly possible for a continental critic, steeped in the literatures of the Romance tongues, to assert that he finds little in the Tales that is

new to him. He might be understood, if he preferred, as most English readers would not, Boccaccio's version of the story of Palamon and Arcite to that which Chaucer puts in the mouth of the Knight. He might assure us with some truth that the story of the patient Griselda is a translation and nothing more of Petrarch's 'Latin version of the Decameron' story. And so he might go through the list, conceding, however, perhaps more readily than the English reader, the originality of Chaucer's adaptation of the fabliau type in the 'Miller's Tale,' 'The Reeve's Tale' and the like, being more capable of appreciating these things in the Chaucerian spirit than the English reader, who is troubled, as Chaucer's audience plainly was not, by the indecorous character of the material upon which such splendid narrative artistry is lavished.

But to proceed thus is to refuse the poet credit for much that he has tried to do. He has not assembled his company of nine and twenty perhaps there were a couple of priests besides merely to treat us to a portrait gallery. High and low, every one, be it noted, succeeded in the life he had chosen, Knight, Squire, Monk, Prioress, on the one hand, Yeoman, Cook and Plowman on the other; rascals like the Friar, the Pardoner, the Summoner; professional men and tradesmen, and the never-forgotten Wife of Bath, all step before us, it is true, in the general prologue. Under the clear, encouraging eye of Chaucer they declare themselves for the folk they are, so that Dryden could see "their humors, their features and their very dress, as distinctly as if [he] had supp'd with them at the Tabard at Southwark." If Chaucer had stopped here, if he had given us nothing beyond his prologue, he would still have written something more brilliant, more sympathetic than anything that can be found in mediæval literature before him, but nothing essentially different from, let us say, the Etats du monde' of many a French satirist. But Chaucer, fortunately, does not stop there. Having got his characters, he set out to order his material in terms of drama. Tale was to be adjusted nicely to teller; character was to play upon character; little personal hostilities, class prejudices, different individual reactions upon some general theme of discussion were to bring the successive stories naturally and dramatically into being, as the pilgrims took their leisurely way along the well-known road to the shrine of the martyred saint. There was to be a constant flow of narrative, washing pleasantly upon the alternate shores of fiction, grave or gay, and of the real life of his own time. This plan, as has been said, is imperfectly carried through. To have conceived it at all, however, and even in part to have given to it poetic expression is to have made a distinct and permanent contribution to the literature of the world.

The reader to-day, making his way through this "God's plenty of stories, serious and trivial, dignified and the reverse, will find his pleasure in tracing out some of the threads of Chaucer's interests, which make up a strand capable of giving, in spite of imperfections, unity and significance to the whole. He will start easily with the 'Knight's Tale,' noting its nice adaptation to its grave, gentle, its thoroughly chivalrous teller, and he may, if he like, pass

from this sort of serious, quasi-historical romance to romance of Oriental character in the multiplied wonders of the 'Squire's Tale,' to Arthurian matter in the Wife of Bath's Tale, and to Chaucer's gentle and searching ridicule of degenerate romance in his own "Tale of Sir Thopas.' But if he is wiser he will read the tales in their setting, interrupting with the drunken Miller the Host's well-laid plans and sharing with the Reeve his resulting indignation, noting in the stories of both the robustness of the characters and the richness of the social background. A like situation he will observe in the tales of the Friar and Summoner. With the 'Physician's Tale' and the experience will doubtless be repeated in the case of the tales of the Man of Law, the Shipman and the Manciple he will miss the sense of delicate and inevitable adjustment; temporary assignments, stop-gaps, perhaps some of them were. But the Pardoner's Tale' is one of the most effectively told of all, and his prologue an amazing and subtle piece of psychologizing. With it he will be interested to compare that other essay in the "literature of exposure," the tale of the Canon's Yeoman. "The Monk's Tale' and the 'Parson's Tale' do not spring of sheer necessity from the situation, but they are excellent in character, and because informing and edifying, more delightful to contemporary readers than can nowadays be easily appreciated. And to the Monk's Tale' the humor of the Nun's Priest, set off with all the arts of a skillful preacher on a holiday, affords a perfect foil, just as Chaucer's ponderous 'Melibus contrasts with the gaiety, imperfectly grasped by the host, of his own 'Sir Thopas. No more delicate adjustment is to be found between tale and teller than in the 'Prioress's Tale,' a story current all over Europe, but here enhanced in value by the artistic uses to which it is put.

Very much on Chaucer's mind, apparently, was the problem of what to do with a certain coarse, forth-putting type of woman whose determination to carry things in her own highhanded way was sure to make trouble for whatever member of the inferior sex she chanced to mate with. Harry Bailey has such a wife, and he has already confided some of his woes on this score to the pilgrims, when the president of this sect of "arch-wives," the very embodiment of all their awful power, steps forward in the person of the Wife of Bath, and in good scholastic style, with full illustration from her own experiences, states her case. Such a subject will not down, and it is the clerk who makes the story of Griselda serve the end of a savage, though delicately administered, satire upon the extravagant positions advanced by the Wife of Bath. At once the Merchant cuts in with a hint of his own miseries in marriage and a story which makes clear his own theory of the bitter disillusion in store for those who trust their wives. It is possible that the 'Squire's Tale,' which treats of love, something quite apart from marriage, according to the mediæval view, might when finished have been brought into closer relation with what goes before. It is certain that it prompts the Franklin to tell his story presenting a husband, a wife, a clerk and a squire in such an amiable light, developing at the same time a theory of mutual forbearance and trust in marriage which is the finest flower of "gentilesse." One can,

if one wishes, push on further and tag the (Second Nun's Tale' as presenting the ecclesiastical view of marriage as something inferior to celibacy.

But it would probably be wrong to do so or to insist that Chaucer, throughout the tales discussed, felt himself constrained to a rigid, doctrinaire discussion of marriage as a problem. He is concerned with the expression of human character in conduct, with the relations of man to his fellow men and women, and to God. Being of the Middle Ages he exhibits some of the conventions of the Middle Ages; the talk of his pilgrims unashamedly informs, it frankly edifies, it indulges in class satire and sex satire, it inevitably finds itself revolving around traditional questions-how do rogues thrive in the world? how shall we make terms with fortune? how is man to succeed in civilizing woman? what is the nature of true gentility? It is impossible for Chaucer to look thoughtfully on human conduct without proceeding in this way to raise these questions. Human conduct, again, for him, as for his time, falls naturally into the elastic and all-embracing category of the seven deadly sins. But this does not mean that Chaucer is writing a tract on marriage or a book of exemplary anecdotes to illustrate the seven deadly sins. It is unlike him to attempt anything so rigidly schematic; certainly whatever his intention he achieved nothing of the sort; it was not for nothing that Dryden called him "a perpetual fountain of good sense." It is this good sense of his which has led him to pierce through the conventions in which he inevitably worked to the plane of our common humanity on which all who love good literature can affectionately meet with him.

Consult Skeat, 'Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer) (7 vols., Oxford 1894), and 'Student's Chaucer (complete text in one volume, Oxford 1894); Hammond, Eleanor P., Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual' (New York 1908) Kittredge, G. L., Chaucer and His Poetry) (Cambridge 1915); Legouis, E., 'Chaucer' (trans. by Lailevoix, London 1913); Tatlock and Mackaye, The Modern Reader's Chaucer (New York 1914); Wells, John E., A Manual of Writings in Middle English' (New Haven 1916).

HARRY MORGAN AYRES, Assistant Professor of English, Columbia University.

CANTHARELLUS.

See FUNGI, Edible. CANTHARIDES, or SPANISH FLIES, the blister-beetle (q.v.), when prepared for medical use. Their value is due to the presence of a chemical principle, called canthariden, which constitutes from 2 to 1 per cent of cantharides, with the formula C10H12O. On hydrolysis, this is converted into cantharidic acid, CHO Cantharadin is obtained by treating the pulverized insects with a solvent, such as alcohol, ether or chloroform (not water), the last being preferable. The solution is evaporated, and the residue is purified from a green oil which adheres to it obstinately, by digesting with bisulphide of carbon or by redissolving in alcohol. Purification is further affected by animal charcoal and the cantharidin crystallized from hot alcohol or chloroform.

Cantharides is used externally for its

counter-irritant action. It must be used with discretion especially in cases of older persons, children or paralysis. It must not be used in renal disease, owing to the risks attendant on absorption. It is administered internally in cases of impotence. Its criminal employment is usually intended to heighten sexual desire, and has frequently led to death. It produces severe gastro-intestinal irritation, and has toxic qualities, the patient usually dying from arrest of the renal functions. The antidote is the administering of bland fluids, such as milk, sodawater and plain water, to dilute the poison in the blood.

A number of insects other than cantharides possess the vesicant property, such as the Chinese beetle (Mylabris cichorii) which is especially rich in cantharidin, yielding about twice as much as the cantharides. Our native blister-beetles, when powdered, nearly resemble Mylabris in color, and are used as adulterants to cantharides.

CANTHOPLASTY (Gr. kanthos, "the angle of the eye" and plastikos, "formative"), the operation of slitting up the outer canthus or corner of the eye, so as to enlarge the opening between the lids, an operation proposed by Ammon when the eyelids are not sufficiently cleft, or when the eyelids produce tension on the eyeball, as in inflammatory processes.

CANTICLE OF THE SUN, The (Il Cantico del Sole), known also as the Praises of the Creatures, is the only work in Italian that we possess of Saint Francis of Assisi. Giulio Bertoni calls it "the most brilliant gem of the Italian religious poetry of the 13th century." Renan goes even so far as to term it "the finest piece of religious poetry since the Gospels." Written in the Umbrian dialect of the Saint's native region, its assonanced prose and occasional rhymes constitute in its primitive form one of the oldest monuments of mediæval Italian. It was improvised at San Damiano in the fall of 1225 at a moment of great spiritual exaltation during a reaction from a period of severe illness and mental stress. Tradition claims the last two stanzas as subsequent additions, the final one having been composed by Saint Francis just prior to his death, 3 Oct. 1226. Consult Mirror of Perfection' Chap. CI, CXIX, CXX, CXXIII.

In this canticle Saint Francis lays bare his own simple, naïve soul, his wonderful love of inanimate nature, his artless faith and innate mystic love. He raises to the Creator a pæan of praise for the light of the sun, the moon and stars, the air and clouds, rain and fire, for mother earth, for those who forgive and endure in peace, and finally for the bodily death "from which no living man can flee." In the loftiness of its inspiration the Canticle of the Sun' must be compared to Psalm 148 of David. Like the famous 'Fioretti' of Saint Francis, a work of later date, the 'Canticle of the Sun' has touched the souls of men and has preserved in Italian hearts the popular tradition of their great Saint. It became in his last days the favorite song of Saint Francis, and must be regarded as the message of the Saint himself in all his joyousness, his hopefulness, his broad sympathy toward all things, his feeling for universal brotherhood. We must not look for great literary merit in this canticle. Francis was not a man of learning,

nor in those primitive times was the art of verse in the vernacular sufficiently developed to be compared with the perfected compositions of the following century. Yet in his religious poetry Saint Francis is of the lineage of Jacopone da Todi, his Franciscan successor, who in turn is the precursor of Dante (consult (Paradiso, canto XI). For a critical study of the writings of Saint Francis consult Robinson, Paschal, The Writings of Saint Francis of Assisi (Philadelphia 1906). For the Italian original text consult Sabatier, Paul, 'Speculum perfectionis' (Paris 1898). For an English translation consult Cuthbert, 'Life of Saint Francis of Assisi' (1914).

ALFRED G. PANARONI.

CANTICLES. One of the canonical books of the Old Testament. The name is derived from the Latin canticula, plural of canticulum, "a little song." In the Vulgate it is called canticum canticorum, "song of songs." This is a literal translation of the Hebrew title which is generally understood to mean "the best song." It may, however, signify "the best songs," if the first word is taken in a collective sense, as it probably should be in the superscription "Songs of the Ascents" in the Pilgrim Psalter (Pss. cxx-cxxxii). The Alexandrian MS of the Greek version has the plural; the Old Latin apparently rendered the title canticula canticulorum; and the Targum paraphrases it "songs and hymns which Solomon uttered." This is likely to be the original meaning. When the name of Solomon was added, it may have been the intention to characterize the collection as the choicest of the 1,005 songs ascribed to this monarch in 1 Kings v, 12. The conception of the work as a unit naturally led to understanding the title in the former sense. At the time when the canon was reduced as a result of the critical inquiry caused by the idea that holy books possessed a sanctity rendering it improper to touch profane things without a ceremonial washing after they had been handled, the question of canonicity arose; but it was settled at the Council of Jamnia (c. 90 A.D.) in favor of the book, probably through the weight of the traditional authorship and the allegorical interpretation R. Akiba seems to have adopted. Whenever in earlier times the allegorical exegesis was rejected, there was a tendency to question again the canonicity. To-day the literal sense is generally accepted, and most modern interpreters either look upon the love expressed in the poems as typical of spiritual devotion or seek for no ulterior significance, feeling with the historian Niebuhr that "something would be missing in the Bible, if there were not in it some expression of the profoundest and strongest of human emotions."

There is no intimation of anything but the obvious meaning in the oldest Greek version, and the book is not mentioned by Philo or in the New Testament. But R. Akiba affirmed that the whole world was not worth the day when it was given to Israel, since all Scriptures were holy but this the holiest of all (Yadaim' iii, 5), and declared that "whoever sings from the Song of Songs in the wine-houses and makes it a (profane) song shall have no share in the world to come" (Tosephta Sanhedrin' xii). He no doubt saw in the book a description of the love of God and Israel, and this