great work of his matured powers, showing how genius carries forward the freshness of feeling for three-score years. I refer, of course, to the "Canterbury Tales," an unfinished poem, like the Faery Queen, and, like it, wonderful as a fragment, for the vast extent of what is achieved, as well as of what was planned. The design of this poem is one of the happiest thoughts that ever housed itself in a poet's heart. A chance-gathered company of pilgrims on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury, meet in a London inn, and the host proposes that they beguile the ride by each telling a tale to his fellow-pilgrims. Thus comes, with its large variety, the collection of the Canterbury Tales. The prologue, containing the description of the pilgrims, is better known, perhaps, than the rest of the work, partly, perhaps, from Stothard's well-known picture of the pilgrimage. From this prefatory poem of a few hundred lines, a truer and livelier conception of the state of society in England, five hundred years ago, can be got than from all other sources of information. It makes us more at home there in the distant years; carries us more into the spirit of the age; lets us see the men and the women of those times, be among them and know their ways of life, manners, and dress, far better than any unimaginative record can do. There are a hundred things— prime elements, too, in a nation's heart-that history never troubles itself with. The torch of a poet's imagination is held on high, and forthwith a light is thrown on the whole region round, and we see a multitude of objects which else would be lost in the distance or the darkness.

Among other matters, the poems of Chaucer are full

of testimony, unstudied testimony, on a momentous subject-tke condition of the Church in those ages, when its abuses, looseness, and luxury roused the indignation of the first of the great Reformers. What an image of monastic voluptuousness is there in one of Chaucer's pictures, a fulllength portrait in one line, when he describes the monk,

"Fat as a whale, and walked like a swan !"

Nor was the poet's bold satire of the corruptions which had crept into the Church the sarcasm of a licentious, irreverent temper, for he has bequeathed to all aftertimes a portrait of the pure clerical character, which, as an imaginative picture of holy life, of Christian piety, zeal, meekness, and self-sacrifice, still stands unequalled in English literature:

Wide was his parish-houses far asunder-
But he neglected nought for rain or thunder,
In sickness and in grief to visit all,

The farthest in his parish, great and small,
Always on foot, and in his hand a stave.

This noble example to his flock he gave:
That first he wrought, and afterward he taught;
Out of the gospel he that lesson caught,

And this new figure added he thereto,

That if gold rust, then what should iron do ?"*

The prologue is curious, too, as representing the free dom and ease of intercourse between the characters, drawn, as they are, from different ranks of society-an absence of reserve and restraint remarkable in an age with which we are apt, falsely perhaps, to associate much of stateliness

*Prologue to Canterbury Tales, v. 479.

and ceremonial. We find here a little social drama, as it were, bearing strongly the stamp of nature and reality, and the parties are unreservedly communing with each other-riding, talking, laughing, eating together. Here is the knight, "a very perfect, gentle knight," newly returned from his adventures, and modest with the memories of many a battle on sea and land, fought with the Moors and the foes of the faithful far away. With him comes his son, full of gayety and gallantry, "wakeful as a nightingale with his amorous ditties ;" and the rest of the company is made up of a demure prioress, a monk, a friar and other ecclesiastical functionaries; a merchant, a franklin, a sea-captain, the doctor of physic, "whose study was but little on the Bible;" the lawyer, "a very busy man, yet seeming busier than he really was;" the parson, drawing mankind to heaven by gentleness; the miller, crafty in cheating his customers; the ploughman, a good, constant, labouring man, living in peace and charity, working hard, and cheerfully paying his dues to the church, along with other hearty commoners, spruced up for the pilgrimage in holiday-dress. There is the frolicsome wife of Bath; and a very different character, not to be forgotten, the Oxford student, silent or sententious, thoughtful and thin by dint of hard study, riding on a lean horse:

"He had rather have at his bed's head
Some twenty volumes, clothed in black or red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophy,

Than richest robes, fiddle or psaltery.
But tho' a true philosopher was he,
Yet had he little gold beneath his key;
But every farthing that his friends e'er lent,
In books and learning was it always spent."

These various characters are brought into happy companionship; and indeed the spirit of all Chaucer's poetry shows that if his own lot was cast in the company of kings and nobles, his human heart had large spaces to hold his fellow-beings in. His sympathies were with freedom in all created things, as in a passage, which is enough, I think, of itself, to open the prison-door and give to liberty and life again any caged bird in the world.

"Where birds are fed in cages,

Though you should day and night tend them like pages,

And strew the bird's room fair and soft as silk,

And give him sugar, honey, bread, and milk:
Yet had the bird, by twenty thousand fold,
Rather be in a forest wild and cold:
And right anon, let but his door be up,
And with his feet he spurneth down his cup,
And to the wood will hie, and feed on worms.
In that new college keepeth he his terms,
And learneth love of his own proper kind:

No gentleness of home his heart may bind."

The poetry of Chaucer is distinguished also for what is an inseparable quality of all high poetry, its genuine and healthy morality, for true imagination is ever one of virtue's ministers. The indelicacy and grossness which stain some of his pages seem to belong rather to the colloquial coarseness of his times, than to fasten on the purity of his feelings. He pleads forgiveness for these blemishes, as not of evil intent, and it is easy to follow his advice when he bids his reader,

"Turn over the leaf, and choose another tale;

For he shall find enough, both great and smale,
Of storial thing that toucheth gentilesse,

And eke morality and holiness."

One of the purest and wisest of the great English poets

who have succeeded Chaucer, has said of him, "If Chaucer is sometimes a coarse moralist, he is still a great one. "'* The plain-spoken coarseness is a spot here and there, but the great body of his poetry is a poet's pure and lofty discipline, thoughtful and affectionate reverence of womanly worth, teaching of Christian well-doing, of heroic morality, and of the morality of every-day life. He moralizes in the poet's happiest mood, imaginatively, feelingly, humorously, as when he teaches us that much-neglected art, the art of living with one another, the social duty of mutual forbearance.

"One thing, sirs, full safely dare I say,
That loving friends each other must obey,
If they would long remain in company :
Love will not be constrain'd by mastery.
When mastery cometh, the God of Love, anon
Beateth his wings, and, farewell! he is gone.
Love is a thing as any spirit free:
Women, by nature, wish for liberty,
And not to be constrain'd as in a thrall;
And so do men-to speak truth-one and all.
Note well the wight most patient in his love:
He standeth, in advantage, all above.
That patience is a virtue high, is plain,
Because it conquers, as the clerkes explain,
Things that rude vigour never could attain.
Chide not for every trifle, nor complain;
Learn to endure, or, so betide my lot,
Learn it ye shall, whether ye will or not.
For in this world is no one, certain 'tis,
But that he sometimes doth or saith amiss.
Anger, ill health, or influence malign

Of planets, changes in the blood, woe, wine,

*Wordsworth, as quoted in the Introduction to Chaucer Modernized, p. xcviii.