Summoner or Church-Bailiff, the grossest form of ecclesiastical sensuality; and his irritable moneygetting Reve or Steward, with his cropped head and calf-less legs, who shaves his beard as closely as he reckons with his master's tenants.

**

The third great quality of Chaucer's humour is 3 its fair play; the truth and humanity which induces him to see justice done to good and bad, to the circumstances which make men what they are, and the mixture of right and wrong, of wisdom and of folly, which they consequently exhibit. His worst characters have some little saving grace of good-nature, or at least of joviality and candour. Even the Pardoner, however impudently, acknowledges himself to be a "vicious man." His best people, with one exception, betray some infirmity. The good Clerk of Oxford, for all his simplicity and singleness of heart, has not escaped the pedantry and pretension of the college. The Good Parson seems without a blemish, even in his wisdom; yet when it comes to his turn to relate a story, he announces it as a "little" tale, and then tells the longest and most prosing in the book,—a whole sermonizing volume. This, however, might be an expression of modesty; since Chaucer uses the same epithet for a similar story of his own telling. But the Good Parson also treats poetry and fiction with contempt. His understanding is narrower

than his motives. The only character in Chaucer which seems faultless, is that of the Knight; and he is a man who has been all over the world, and bought experience with hard blows. The poet does not spare his own person. He describes himself as

a fat, heavy man, with an "elvish" (wildish?) countenance, shy, and always "staring on the ground." Perhaps he paid for his genius and knowledge with the consequences of habits too sedentary, and a vein, in his otherwise cheerful wisdom, of hypochondriacal wonder. He also puts in his own mouth a fairy-tale of chivalry, which the Host interrupts with contempt, as a tiresome commonplace. I take it to have been a production of the modest poet's when he was young; for in the midst of what looks like intentional burlesque, are expressions of considerable force and beauty.

This self-knowledge is a part of Chaucer's greatness; and these modest proofs of it distinguish him from every other poet in the language. Shakspeare may have had as much, or more. It is difficult to suppose otherwise. And yet there is no knowing what qualities, less desirable, might have hindered even his mighty insight into his fellow-creatures from choosing to look so closely into himself. His sonnets are not without intimations of personal and other defects; but they contain no such candid talking as Chaucer.

The father of English poetry was essentially a modest man. He sits quietly in a corner, looking down for the most part, and meditating; at other times eyeing everything that passes, and sympa- S thizing with everything;-chuckling heartily at a jest, feeling his eyes fill with tears at sorrow, reverencing virtue, and not out of charity with vice. When he ventures to tell a story himself, it is as much under correction of the Host as the humblest man in the company; and it is no sooner objected to, than he drops it for one of a different description.

I have retained the grave character of the Knight in the selection, because he is the leader of the cavalcade.

The syllables that are to be retained in reading the verses are marked with the brief accent The terminating vowels thus distinguished were certainly pronounced during one period of our language, otherwise they would not have been written; though, by degrees, the comparative faintness of their utterance, and disuse of them in some instances, enabled writers to use them as they pleased; just as poets in our own day retain or not, as it suits them, the e's in the final syllable of participles and past tenses;-such as belov'd, beloved; swerv'd, swerved, &c. The French in their verses use their terminating vowels at this moment pre

cisely as Chaucer did; though they drop them in conversation. I have no living Frenchman at hand to quote, but he writes in this respect as Boileau did :

Elle dit; et du vent de sa bouchě profaně

Lui souffle avec ces mots l'ardeur de la chicaně;

Le Prélat se reveillě; et, plein d'émotion,

Lui donně toutefois la benediction.

(Discord waking the Dean in the Lutrin).

CHARACTERS OF PILGRIMS.

Whanně that April with his shourěs sote
The droughte of March hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veine in swiche licòur,
Of whiche vertue engendred is the flour;1
Whan Zephirus ekě with his sotě brethe
Enspired hath in every holt and hethe
The tendre croppěs, and the yongě sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smalě foules maken melodie,

That slepen alle night with open eye,

When April with his sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein in the balm that produces flowers; when Zephyr too, with his sweet breath, has animated the tender green buds in the woods and on the heaths; and the young sun has run half his course in the Ram; and the little winged creatures, that sleep all night with their eyes open, begin their music, (so irre

So priketh hem natùre in her coràges,
Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes
To servě halwes couthe in sundry londes ;
And specially from every shire's ende
Of Englelond to Canterbury they wende,
The holy blissful martyr for to seke.2

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke.
Befelle that in that seson on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard3 as I lay,
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Canterbury with devoute couràge,
At night was come into that hostelrie
Wel nine-and-twenty in a compagnie
Of sondry folk, by àventure yfalle

In felawship, and pilgrimes were they alle
That toward Canterbury wolden ride.

The chambres and the stables weren wide,

And wel we weren esěd attě beste.

And shortly, when the sonne was gon to reste,
So hadde I spoken with hem everich on,

That I was of hir felawship anon,

sistible in their hearts is Nature), then do people long to go on pilgrimages, and palmers to seek foreign shores in order to worship at famous shrines; and, above all, people crowd from every shire's end in England to that of the holy martyr at Canterbury, who has helped them when they were sick.

Now, at this season, it happened one day, while I was at the Tabard in Southwark, ready to set forth on my own devout journey to Canterbury, that there came into the inn a matter of nine-and-twenty people, who had joined company, and were all bound on the same visit. There was plenty of room in the place both for man and horse, and we were all very comfortable.

By sunset I had spoken with every one of these persons, and become