always very artificially-given consistency and connection to their stories by putting them into the mouth of some single narrator: the various histories which compose the Thousand and One Nights are supposed to be successively recounted by the untiring lips of the inexhaustible Princess Scheherezade; but the source from whence Chaucer more immediately adopted his framing was the Decameron of Boccaccio. This work (as it may be necessary to inform our younger readers) consists of a hundred tales divided into decades, each decade occupying one day in the relation. They are narrated by a society of young men and women of rank, who have shut themselves up in a most luxurious and beautiful retreat on the banks of the Arno, in order to escape the infection of the terrible plague then ravaging Florence.

It

If we compare the plan of Chaucer with that of the Florentine, we shall not hesitate to give the palm of propriety, probability, and good taste to the English poet. A pilgrimage was by no means an expedition of a mournful or solemn kind, and afforded the author the widest field for the selection of character from all classes of society, and an excellent opportunity for the divers humours and oddities of a company fortuitously assembled. is impossible, too, not to feel that there is something cruel and shocking in the notion of these young luxurious Italians of Boccaccio whiling away their days in tales of sensual trickery or sentimental distress, while without the well-guarded walls of their retreat thousands of their kinsmen and fellow-citizens were writhing in despairing agony. Moreover, the similarity of rank and age in the personages of Boccaccio produces an insipidity and want of variety: all these careless voluptuaries are repetitions of Dioneo and Fiammetta: and the period of ten days adopted by the Italian has the defect of being purely arbitrary, there being no reason why the narratives might not be continued indefinitely. Chaucer's Pilgrimage, on the contrary, is made to Canterbury, and occupies a certain and necessary time; and, on the return of the travellers, the society separates as naturally as it had assembled; after giving the poet the opportunity of introducing two striking and appropriate events-their procession to the shrine of St. Thomas at their arrival in Canterbury, and the prize-supper on their return to London.

Had Chaucer adhered to his original plan, we should have had a tale from each of the party on the journey out, and a second tale from every pilgrim on the way back, making in all sixty-two -or, if the Host also contributed his share, sixty-four. But, alas! the poet has not conducted his pilgrims even to Canterbury; and the tales which he has made them tell only make us the more bitterly lament the non-fulfilment of his original intention.

Before we speak of the narratives themselves, it will be proper to state that our poet continues to describe the actions, conversation, and deportment of his pilgrims: and nothing can be finer than the remarks put into their mouths respecting the merits of the various tales; or more dramatic than the affected bashfulness of some, when called upon to contribute to the amusement of their companions, and the squabbles and satirical jests made by others.

These passages, in which the tales themselves are, as it were, incrusted, are called Prologues to the various narratives which they respectively precede, and they add inexpressibly to the vivacity and movement of the whole, as in some cases the tales spring, as it were, spontaneously out of the conversations.

Of the tales themselves it will be impossible to attempt even a rapid summary: we may mention, as the most remarkable among the serious and pathetic narratives, the Knight's Tale, the subject of which is the beautiful story of Palamon and Arcite, taken from the Teseide of Boccaccio, but it is unknown whether originally invented by the great Italian, or, as is far more probable, imitated by him from some of the innumerable versions of the "noble story" of Theseus current in the Middle Ages. The poem is full of a strange mixture of manners and periods: the chivalric and the heroic ages appear side by side: but such is the splendour of imagination displayed in this immortal work, so rich is it in magnificence, in pathos, in exquisite delineations of character, and artfully contrived turns of fortune, that the reader voluntarily dismisses all his chronology, and allows himself to be carried away with the fresh and sparkling current of chivalric love and knightly adventure. No reader ever began this poem without finishing it, or ever read it once without returning to it a second time. The effect upon the mind is like that of some gorgeous tissue, gold-inwoven, of tapestry, in an old baronial hall; full of tournaments and battles, imprisoned knights, and emblazoned banners, Gothic temples of Mars and Venus, the lists, the dungeon and the lady's bower, garden and fountain, and moonlit groves. Chaucer's peculiar skill in the delineation of character and appearance by a few rapid and masterly strokes is as perceptible here as in the Prologue to the Tales: the procession of the kings to the tournament is as bright and vivid a piece of painting as ever was produced by the "strong braine" of medieval Art: and in point of grace and simplicity, what can be finer than the single line descriptive of the beauty of Emilie-so suggestive, and therefore so superior to the most elaborate portrait-“ Up rose the sun, and up rose Emelie"?

The next poem of a serious character is the Squire's Tale, which indeed so struck the admiration of Milton-himself pro

foundly penetrated by the spirit of the Romanz poetry-that it is by an allusion to the Squire's Tale that he characterizes Chaucer when enumerating the great men of all ages, and when he places him beside Plato, Shakspeare, Æschylus, and his beloved Euripides: he supposes his Cheerful Man as evoking Chaucer:

"And call up him who left half told

The story of Cambuscan bold."

The imagery of the Squire's Tale was certainly well calculated to strike such a mind as Milton's, so gorgeous, so stately, so heroic, and imbued with all the splendour of Oriental literature; for the scenery and subject of this poem bear evident marks of that Arabian influence which colours so much of the poetry of the Middle Ages, and which probably began to act upon the literature of Western Europe after the Crusades.

In point of deep pathos-pathos carried indeed to an extreme and perhaps hardly natural or justifiable pitch of intensity-we will now cite, among the graver tales of our pilgrims, the story put into the mouth of the Clerke of Oxenforde. This is the story of the Patient Griselda-a model of womanly and wifely obedience, who comes victoriously out of the most cruel and repeated ordeals inflicted upon her conjugal and maternal affections. The beautiful and angelic figure of the Patient Wife in this heart-rending story reminds us of one of those seraphic statues of Virgin Martyrs which stand with clasped hands and uplifted, imploring eye, in the carved niches of a Gothic cathedral-an eternal prayer in sculptured stone,

Patience, on a monument,
Smiling at Grief!"

The subject of this tale is, as we mentioned some pages back, invented by Boccaccio, and first seen in 1374, by Petrarch, who was so struck with its beauty that he translated it into Latin, and it is from this translation that Chaucer drew his materials. The English poet indeed appears to have been ignorant of Boccaccio's claim to the authorship, for he makes his "Clerke" say that he had learned it from "Fraunceis Petrarke, the laureat poéte." Petrarch himself bears the strongest testimony to the almost overwhelming pathos of the story, for he relates that he gave it to a Paduan acquaintance of his to read, who fell into a repeated agony of passionate tears. Chaucer's poem is written in the Italian

stanza.

Of the comic tales the following will be found the most excellent:-The Nun's Priest's Tale, a droll apologue of the Cock and the Fox, in which the very absurdity of some of the accompaniments confers one of the highest qualities which a fable can possess, viz. so high a degree of individuality that the reader for

gets that the persons of the little drama are animals, and sympathizes with them as human beings; the Merchant's Tale, which, like the comic stories generally, though very indelicate, is yet replete with the richest and broadest humour; the Reve's Tale, and many shorter stories distributed among the less prominent characters. But the crown and pearl of Chaucer's drollery is the Miller's Tale, in which the delicate and penetrating description of the various actors in the adventure can only be surpassed by the perfectly natural yet outrageously ludicrous catastrophe of the intrigue in which they move.

There is certainly nothing, in the vast treasury of ancient or modern humorous writing, at once so real, so droll, and so exquisitely enjoué in the manner of telling. It is true that the subject is not of the most delicate nature; but, though coarse and plainspeaking, Chaucer is never corrupt or vicious: his improprieties are rather the fruit of the ruder age in which he lived, and the turbid ebullitions of a rich and active imagination, than the cool, analysing, studied profligacy-the more dangerous and corrupting because veiled under a false and morbid sentimentalism-which defiles a great portion of the modern literature of too many civilised countries.

It is worthy of remark that all the tales are in verse with the exception of two, one of which, singularly enough, is given to Chaucer himself. This requires some explanation. When the poet is first called upon for his story, he bursts out into a long, confused, fantastical tale of chivalry, relating the adventures of a certain errant-knight, Sir Thopas, and his wanderings in search of the Queen of Faërie. This is written in the peculiar versification of the Trouvères (note, that it is the only tale in which he has adopted this measure), and is full of all the absurdities of those compositions. When in the full swing of declamation, and when we are expecting to be overwhelmed with page after page of this "sleazy stuff,"-for the poet goes on gallantly, like Don Quixote," in the style his books of chivalry had taught him, imitating, as near as he can, their very phrase," he is suddenly interrupted by honest Harry Bailey, the Host, who plays the part of Moderator or Chorus to Chaucer's pleasant comedy. The Host begs him, with many strong expressions of ridicule and disgust, to give them no more of such "drafty rhyming," and entreats him to let them hear something less worn-out and tiresome. The poet then proposes to entertain the party with "a litel thinge in prose," and relates the allegorical story of Melibœus and his wife Patience. It is evident that Chaucer, well aware of the immeasurable superiority of the newly revived classical literature over the barbarous and now exhausted invention of the Romanz poets, has chosen this ingenious method of ridiculing the com

monplace tales of chivalry; but so exquisitely grave is the irony in this passage, that many critics have taken the Rime of Sir Thopas' for a serious composition, and have regretted that it was left a fragment!

The other prose tale (we have mentioned Melibœus) is supposed to be related by the Parson, who is always described as a model of Christian humility, piety, and wisdom; which does not, however, save him from the terrible suspicion of being a Lollard, i. e., a heretical and seditious revolutionist.

This composition hardly can be called a "tale," for it contains neither persons nor events; but it is very curious as a specimen of the sermons of the early Reformers; for a sermon it is, and nothing else—a sermon on the Seven Deadly Sins, divided and subdivided with all the pedantic regularity of the day. It also gives us a very curious insight into the domestic life, the manners, the costume, and even the cookery, of the fourteenth century. Some critics have contended that this sermon was added to the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer at the instigation of his confessors, as a species of penitence for the light and immoral tone of much of his writings, and particularly as a sort of recantation, or amende honorable, for his innumerable attacks on the monks. But this supposition is in direct contradiction with every line of his admirable portrait of the Parson; and, however natural it may have been for the licentious Boccaccio to have done such public penance for his ridicule of the "Frati," and his numberless sensual and immoral scenes, his English follower was "made of sterner stuff." The friend of John of Gaunt, and the disciple of Wickliffe, was not so easily to be worked upon by monastic subtlety as the more superstitious and sensuous Italian.

The language of Chaucer is a strong exemplification of the remarks we made in our first chapter respecting the structure of the English language. The ground of his diction will be ever found to be the pure vigorous Anglo-Saxon English of the people, inlaid, if we may so style it, with an immense quantity of NormanFrench words. We may compare this diction to some of those exquisite specimens of incrusting left us by the obscure but great artists of the Middle Ages, in which the polish of metal or ivory contrasts so richly with the lustrous ebony.

The difficulty of reading this great poet is very much exaggerated a very moderate acquaintance with the French and Italian of the fourteenth century, and the observation of a few simple rules of pronunciation, will enable any educated person to read and to enjoy. In particular it is to be remarked that the final letter e, occurring in so many English words, had not yet become an e mute; and must constantly be pronounced, as well as the termination of the past tense, ed, in a separate syllable. The accent