besides her portrait in the Prologue, is allowed to describe herself, later, in a prologue of her own. The Parson's character is Chaucer's ideal of a good priest; of the Ploughman, his brother, there is a companion portrait, the honest workman. The Reeve, the Miller, the Manciple, the Sumner, with the Pardoner, make up the number of the pilgrims found by Chaucer at the Tabard in Southwark. These latter personages are not carelessly passed over; they are the less gentle part of the company, but they are not all alike; the Pardoner, like the Wife of Bath, has an opportunity of telling all about himself before he begins his tale. It was the host of the Tabard, Harry Baily, who proposed that they should tell stories by the way, he himself coming with them as "judge and reporter." Each man was to tell two stories on the way out, and two more on the way home, and the best teller of stories was to be entertained at supper by the other pilgrims when they all came back to the Tabard. The Canterbury Tales are unfinished. No pilgrim tells more than one story (except Chaucer, whose first attempt, Sir Thopas, is disallowed by the host), though a new companion, the Canon's Yeoman, who joins them on the last day of the outward journey, is permitted to tell his tale against the alchemists. The plan required interludes between one story and another : in these, of course, the pilgrims discourse in their own character, and one story-teller is dismissed and another is called upon to begin. But there are parts of the Tales without any such interlude, and some of the Tales are not brought into connection with the rest. On examination it has been found that the following groups have been left. The arrangement, due to Dr. Furnivall, is adopted by the Chaucer Society, by Dr. Skeat, in his edition of Chaucer, and generally for purposes of reference : General scheme and classifica tion of the work. First Day.-Group A: Prologue; Knight, Miller, Reeve, Cook. Third Day.-Group C: Physician, Pardoner. Group D: Wife of Bath, Canon's Yeoman. Group H: Manciple. Group G: Second Nun, "The Canterbury Tales"; a résumé of Chaucer's The Tales were not all written for their tellers; on the contrary, Chaucer appears to have made use of his earlier work, sometimes without much revision. Thus the Second Nun's Tale, the Man of Law's Tale, and the Monk's, have been already mentioned, and the Knight's Tale is apparently a new version of a poem on which Chaucer had spent much time before he thought of the pilgrimage. The Tales as a whole do not, like Troilus and Criseyde, The House of Fame, or The Legend of Good Women, represent work of all kinds and periods. one particular stage of his work, or one definite experiment; they contain almost every kind of subject, and most of the various manners of treatment employed by Chaucer. They represent most of the varied kinds of story in fashion in the Middle Ages. The Knight's Tale is a romance of adventures, including one of the sentimental problems that were in favour in a certain order of romances. The Squire's Tale (left half told) contains a similar problem, with a different settingamong the marvels of the East, such as were to be revived again when the Arabian Nights were translated three centuries after Chaucer. The Wife of Bath's Tale is a fairy story of a kind well known in the old French lais, derived from Welsh or Breton fables; while the Breton lais (whatever may have been meant by the name) are expressly referred to as sources of the Franklin's Tale. The story of Constance is a familiar story in all popular tradition-the persecuted, innocent wife, the calumnious mother-in-law, with poetical justice to bring all things right in the end. These are romances; but romances were not the only kind of fiction available. The ribald stories of the French Fabliaux are represented by the Reeve and the Miller, and by other of the more churlish pilgrims. A less rudimentary kind of humour was to be found in some of the comic stories of the cycle of Reynard the Fox, from which Chaucer has drawn the material for the most pleasant of his lighter pieces, the tale of the Cock and the Fox, the Nun's Priest's Tale. The Pardoner, like the Wife of Bath, after a monologue in which he utters all his naughtiness, is permitted to change his tone, and gives a moral apologue "of the three knaves who went to look for Death." The Doctor of Physic tells the story of Virginia in the grave pathetic manner of The Legend of Good Women. The Prioress tells of the boy martyr put to death by the Jews like Hugh of Lincoln. The Cook begins a story of an idle apprentice, which would have competed with the rogues' romances of Nash or Defoe; the loss of it is, in part, made up by the thorough analytical study of the alchemist (not the sorcerer of romance) in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale. Chaucer's Rime of Sir Thopas is his parody of an old-fashioned kind of poetry, which he appreciated perhaps more highly than he would have us believe. Parson's Tale and the Tale of Melibeus-"a litel thing in prose "-which is substituted as Chaucer's story when his Sir Thopas is stopped by the host, are specimens of the moralist, one good, the other extremely trying, both equally characteristic of medieval taste. Chaucer, to the end, retained his ordinary sensible views of the advantages of sound education. However far he may have ventured beyond the range of the average man of his day, he was always ready to come back; and for the sake of education and the diffusion of knowledge, he translated his "Boece" and his Melibeus, and compiled his Treatise on the Astrolabe and his Parson's Tale. The Shorter § 6. While engaged in his greater works Chaucer wrote several short poems, many of them very pleasant, such as the address to his secretary Adam-an epigram on the careless transcriber of his poems-and the ballad to poems and Rosamond, an ironically graceful version of courtly ballads. sentiment. More than one of his later poems refer to his own distresses, in a tone not infrequently repeated by the greatest of Chaucer's followers, Dunbar. The ballads of Fortune, the Complaint to the Empty Purse, and the Envoys to Scogan and Bukton, belong to the unfortunate years. The Complaint of Venus, as already noted, is a translation from the French of Granson, and a return to the early manner, showing how Chaucer refused to break with his old masters, even when he had learned the imperfection of their ways of thinking. The Treatise on the Astrolabe, written for Lewis, his son, about 1391, is another proof of Chaucer's versatility, and of the strength of his attachment to all the subjects which he had once been led to study. of Chaucer's Originality genius: its the Middle Ages and the Renais relation to sance. $7. Chaucer represents the Middle Ages by giving form in English to medieval subjects that had not before his time been displayed to advantage in this country. He represents the Renaissance through his understanding of the Italian poets, and his adoption of their classical principles in all his finest poems. That he was a critic and a student of literature is as evident as that he did not always stick at critical scruples. His mastery of style is only partly derived from the Italians. No English poet has borrowed more than the "great translator," none with more originality and independence. It was his own genius that taught him to fill up the outline of the "tragedy " of Troilus, and to reduce the encumbrances of ornament which Boccaccio had given to Palamon and Arcite; he had no master in the ironical comedy of The Canterbury Tales. In the monologues of the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and the Canon's Yeoman, he anticipates a form of poetry which is more familiar to modern readers in Tennyson and Browning than in any earlier author. If not the best of Chaucer's poetry, it is this kind which is most distinctly original and most different from that of his contemporaries; it is a kind which is only possible to an author of perfect balance and judgment; the ironical view that it implies is something quite distinct from any of the common literary forms of the Middle Ages, and is used by Chaucer in his own way. The balance of faculties to be observed in Chaucer's best works is something quite different from the "classical" correctness that might be learned in schools of literature. It is his genius, though it is aided by study, and by many experiments and some failures. In the age of Chaucer there seems to have been a perfect agreement and understanding between the poets and their Decline of literature after Chaucer. audience the good manners and good temper of the readers bringing out the qualities of the poet. The courtly qualities of Chaucer, without his genius, are to be found in Gower. In the next generation there was a change. Somehow or other the fine manners of the time of Edward III and Richard II were lost, and for nearly two centuries there was a decline in literature. When poetry revived in the Elizabethan age, it was found that all the rudiments had to be learned over again, and with all their genius none of the great poets of that time were fortunate enough to recover Chaucer's secret, the perfect accommodation of his work at once to his own standard of excellence and to the intelligence and sympathies of those for whom he wrote. NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. A. THE PREDECESSORS OF GOWER AND CHAUCER. By the middle of the fourteenth century the spirit of patriotism evoked by Edward III combined with the influence of the continental Renaissance to produce a flourishing national literature. Its chief product, as in most similar cases, was poetry; but the earliest works in prose that can be properly called English belong to the same date. In 1356 Mandeville dedicated his Travels to Edward III; in 1362 Parliament was first opened by a speech in English; Chaucer had begun to write, and Gower had exchanged the French and Latin of his earlier works for his mother tongue. The meeting of different influences which has been referred to in the text may be illustrated by the fact that the last great hero of chivalry, the Black Prince, and Ockham (see p. 29), the last and greatest of the English Schoolmen, lived in the same century with Chaucer, the father of English poetry, and Wycliffe, the herald of the Reformation. The new literature may be distinguished from the literature of the two preceding centuries of transition (although it is difficult to draw any precise line of demarcation) by its substance as well as its form. While the language has become so like modern English that it can be read with tolerable ease, by pronouncing syllables which are now mute, by allowing for the retention of some inflectional forms, especially in the pronouns and the verbs, and by taking the trouble to learn the meaning of a few words now obsolete; the subjects are, at the same time, no longer borrowed entirely from the monastic chroniclers or the Norman minstrels; and those so borrowed are treated with the independence of native genius. These characteristics are first fully seen in Chaucer, and, in a less degree, in Gower, whose genius was, of course, far less commanding than Chaucer's; but these two had several precursors in England, while a vigorous native literature grew up in the AngloSaxon parts of Scotland. ADAM DAVIE (fl. circ. 1308) and RICHARD ROLLE, the hermit of Hampole, near Doncaster (1290?-1349), both writers of metrical paraphrases of Scripture, and of other religious pieces, belong properly to the Old English period. Davie is the only English poet named in the reign of Edward II; but his real date and identity are disputed. Rolle also wrote, in the Northumbrian dialect, a homiletic poem called The Prick of Conscience, in seven books, and nearly ten thousand lines. The first poet of any merit known to us by name is LAURENCE MINOT (1300?1352), who wrote between 1333 and 1352. His poems were discovered by Tyrwhitt in 1775, and printed by Ritson in 1796 (reprinted 1825) with an introduction on the wars of Edward III. They celebrate ten victories of the king in his wars with France and Scotland, but begin with his defeat at Halidon Hill (1333), and then, after going back, by way of effective contrast, to Bannockburn, proceed with Edward's French victories and his vengeance on Scotland at Neville's Cross (1346). The last lay, the taking of Guisnes (1352), gives an approximate date for the author, who may, of course, have written the other poems soon after the events commemorated. Equal in spirit to the best of our heroic ballads, they have more sustained power and their composition is more finished. Their language is a border dialect, nearly akin to the Scotch; it is quite intelligible when a few obsolete words and constructions have been mastered. Among their varied measures we meet with the animated double triplet, familiar in the poems of Scott. In Minot's poems rhyme is regularly employed, while the frequent alliterations not only remind us of the principle of Anglo-Saxon composition, but prove how much the popular ear still required that artifice. There is another famous poem of the same age, constructed of a mixture of alliteration and rhythmical accent, without rhyme, the alliteration being stricter than that of the Anglo-Saxons themselves. This is The Vision of Piers the Plowman, or, rather, The Vision of William concerning Piers (i.e. Peter) the Plowman, an allegory of the difficulties in the course of human life, kindred in conception to Bunyan's great work, and in its day scarcely less popular. Its prevalent spirit is satirical and is directed against abuses and vices in general, but, in particular, against the corruptions of the Church. From a moral (not, of course, doctrinal) point of view it approximates to the standpoint of the later Puritans, with whom it was a great favourite. Its final cast consists of nearly 8000 long lines (or couplets) in twenty-three "passus," or sections. Its first part is devoted to the Vision; the second (and longer) part to a sequel, entitled the Vita de Do- Wel, Do-Bet, and Do-Best. Each couplet has two principal accents, with considerable licence as to the number of syllables. The alliteration falls on three accented syllables in each couplet, namely, on both those of the first line, and on the first in the second line (sometimes on the second). As these peculiarities can only be understood by an example, we give the opening of the poem, which also shows us the scene of the vision, among the Malvern Hills-not far, it is interesting to note, from the village where Layamon had lived and written. The orthography is taken from the B" text of the poem in the Early English Text Society's edition (ed. Dr. Skeat, 1869): This opening probably marks the early residence of the poet. The third couplet, with other internal evidence, points to his having been a priest. The date of the first cast of this poem is fixed by his allusions to the treaty of Bretigny (1360) and to the great tempest of January 15, 1362, of which he speaks as a recent event. Tradition ascribes the work to a certain ROBERT LANGLAND; but the writer says that he was called "Longe Wille," and it may be reasonably concluded from this that his Christian name was William. He often alludes to his poverty: he seems to have lived in London and in Bristol. His acquaintance with eccle |