Englished by Chaucer, in spirit as well language, from the "Teseide" of Boccaccio. The monk is asked for the next story, but the miller is drunk, and forces on his companions what he calls a noble tale. This is a coarse tale told with vivid mastertouches; and, as its jest is against a carpenter, Oswald the reeve is provoked to match it with a coarser jest against a miller. An honest warning of their nature is placed by Chaucer before these two stories, which belong to the broad view of life, but show the low animal part of it:

"And therefore whoso list it not to hear

Turn over the leaf and choose another tale;
For he shall find ynow both great and smale
Of storial thing that toucheth gentilesse,
And eke morality and holiness."

In plainest words the reader is warned beforehand by the purehearted poet of the character of these two stories; in order that they may be passed over by those who would avoid their theme. The miller's tale has in its coarseness a rough moral at the close. The reeve's tale paints a form of life that we can well spare from the picture. Yet it is taken from the "Decameron," and was put by Boccaccio not, as by Chaucer, in a churl's mouth, but upon the lips of one of his fine ladies. After this, we find throughout what we found in the knight's tale, Chaucer's sense of the pure beauty of womanhood. There is the whole range of character to be included in his picture, but on the fleshly side most natural and genial are the touches with which he gives the wife of Bath her place among the company. Chaucer began a cook's tale of a riotous apprentice, as if he meant to read a lesson to the Perkin revellers of the day, but he broke off, weary of low themes. The Tale of Gamelyn, a bright piece of the class of poetry to which the Robin Hood ballads belong, is here placed, as a cook's tale, in Chaucer's series. It may have been among his papers, but it probably is from another hand. There is in this tale an Adam Spencer-that is Adam the butler or cellarer -who, with certain changes, reappeared after many years in "As You Like It," and whose part Shakespeare himself is said to have acted. The "Man of Law's Tale" is of a good woman, the pious Constance, and seems to have been taken from the second book of Gower's "Confessio Amantis." The "Wife of Bath's Tale" of a knight, Florentius, who by obedience won a perfect bride, is again one of the tales of the "Confessio Amantis." The "Friar's Tale" contemns the cruel rapacity of

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sompnours; and the "Sompnour's Tale" scorns hypocritical rapacity in friars. The "Clerk's Tale" is the story of the patience of Griselda, the last tale in the "Decameron," and one which Petrarch said none had been able to read without tears. With the last letter he ever wrote, Petrarch sent to Boccaccio his own Latin prose version of it, as a religious allegory, made in 1373, the year before his own death, and two years before the death of Boccaccio; the year also of Chaucer's visit to Italy. It was "De Obedientia et Fide Uxoria, Mythologia" (A Myth upon Wifely Obedience and Faith), and Chaucer's poem is distinctly founded not on the tale as it stands in the "Decameron," but upon Petrarch's moralised version. This we find throughout, from the form of opening down to the religious application at the end, and the citation of the general Epistle of St. James, in the stanzas beginning

"For sith a woman was so patiënt

Unto a mortal man, well more we ought,
Receiven all in gree that God us sent."

But the poetical treatment of the story is so individual that it all comes afresh out of the mind of Chaucer. Its pathos is heightened by the humanising touch with which the English poet reconciles the most matter-of-fact reader to its questionable aspects. He feels that the incidents of the myth are against Nature, and at every difficult turn in the story he disarms the realist with a light passage of fence, and wins to his own side the host of readers who have the common English turn for ridicule of an ideal that conflicts with reason. Chaucer's "Merchant's Tale" is that afterwards modernised by Pope in his "January and May." His "Squire's Tale" is of the Tartar Cambys Kan, or Cambuscan, of his two sons Algarsif and Camballo, and of his daughter Canace, who had a ring enabling her to hear the speech of birds, and a mirror which showed coming adversity, or falsehood in a lover. This is a tale of enchantment, left unfinished, with stately promise of a sage and solemn tune, and which suggested to Milton the wish that the grave spirit of thoughtfulness would raise Musæus or Orpheus

"Or call up him that left half told
The story of Cambuscan bold.

Of Cambell and of Algarsife,

And who had Canace to wife,

That owned the virtuous ring and glass;

And of the wondrous horse of brass

On which the Tartar king did ride.

The "Franklin's Tale," to be found also in the "Decameron" (fifth of the tenth day), was of a wife true of word as true of heart. The second "Nun's Tale" was of St. Cecilia, from the "Golden Legend," a treatise on Church Festivals, written at the end of the thirteenth century by an Archbishop of Genoa, Jacobus à Voragine, and translated into French by Jehan de Vignoy. The "Pardoner's Tale" (eighty-second in the "Cento Novelle Antiche") is a lesson against riotous living. Three profligates would slay Death, the slayer of the young. An old man said they would find him under an oak in the wood. They found there nearly eight bushels of gold florins. At this they rejoiced, and cast lots which of them should go to the town to fetch bread and wine while the others watched the treasure. The lot fell on the youngest. While he was gone his comrades plotted to kill him on his return, that the gold might be divided between two only; and he himself plotted to poison two of the bottles of wine he brought, that all the gold might belong to himself alone. So they slew him, and had short mirth afterwards over the wine he had poisoned.

The "Shipman's Tale" was from the "Decameron" (first of the eighth day), of a knavish young monk. The prioress told the legend of a Christian child killed by the Jews in Asia. The child when living loved the Virgin, who appeared to it when dying and put a grain under its tongue, so that the dead childmartyr still sang "O alma Redemptoris Mater." Until the grain was removed the song continued. Chaucer himself began "The Rime of Sir Thopas," a merry burlesque upon the metrical romances of the day, ridiculing the profusion of trivial detail that impeded the progress of a story of tasteless adventures. Sir Thopas rode into a forest, where he lay down, and as he had dreamed all night that he should have an elf queen for his love, got on his horse again to go in search of the elf queen; met a giant, whom he promised to kill next day, the giant throwing stones at him; and came again to town to dress himself for the adventure. The pertinacity with which the rhyme proceeds to spin and hammer out all articles of clothing and armour worn by Sir Thopas makes the Host exclaim at the story-teller, "Mine earës aken for thy drasty speech," and cry "no more." The device, too, is ingenious which puts the poet out of court in his own company, so far as regards the question who won the supper. His verse having been cried out upon, Chaucer answers the demand upon him for a tale in prose with the tale of

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Melibæus, a moral allegory upon the duties of life, translated from the Latin of Albertano de Brescia, or its French version, the "Livre de Melibée et de Dame Prudence." Only this and the "Parson's Tale" are written in prose. The "Monk's Tale" is of men in high estate who have fallen into hopeless adversity—a series of short "tragedies," suggested by a popular Latin prose book of Boccaccio's, on the "Falls of Illustrious Men" (De Casibus Illustrium Virorum). Among the Monk's examples is that of Ugolino, whereof Chaucer writes that they who would hear it at length should go to Dante, "the gretë poete of Itaille," as he had said of any reader curious to hear more of Zenobia, "Let him unto my maister Petrarch go." The Host at last stopped Piers the Monk because his tales were dismal; and Sir John, the Nun's Priest, asked for something merry, told a tale of the Cock and the Fox, taken from the fifth chapter of the "Roman de Renart."

Thus the pilgrims made for themselves entertainment by the way till they reached Boughton-under-Blean, seven miles from Canterbury, where they were overtaken by a Canon's Yeoman, who was followed by his master. These had ridden after the pilgrims for three miles. They seem to have followed them from Faversham, where the Canon-a ragged, joyless alchemist, who lived in a thieves' lane of the suburb-was on the watch for travellers whom he might join and dupe with his pretensions to a power of transmuting metals. This Canon, said his man, after other flourishing as herald of his master, could pave all their road to Canterbury with silver and gold. "I wonder, then," said Harry Bailly, "that your lord is so sluttish, if he can buy better clothes. His overslop is not worth a mite; it is all dirty and torn." Chaucer proceeds then skilfully to represent the gradual but quick slide of the yeoman's faith from his master, who, when he caught up the company, found his man owning that they lived by borrowing gold of men who think that of a pound they can make two:

"Yet it is false; and ay we have good hope

It is for to doon, and after it we grope."

The Canon cried at his man for a slanderer. The Host bade the man tell on, and not mind his master, who then turned and fled for shame, leaving the company to be entertained with the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale," preluded with experience of alchemy.

The Manciple related after this the tale from Ovid's "Metamorphoses" of the turning of the crow from white to black for having told Apollo of the falsehood of his Coronis. There is

G#

then an indication of the time of day, four o'clock in the afternoon, before the "Parson's Tale," which evidently was meant to stand last, for it is a long and earnest sermon in prose on a text applying the parable of a pilgrimage to man's heavenward journey. The text is from Jeremiah vi. 16: “Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls."

CHAPTER V.

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

1. THE fifteenth century, which added to our literature not one masterpiece, fed with its very mists the great streams of the future. Scattered personal interest sped over the scene as a wild mass of clouds, and rolled at times into a tempest to which mists of darkness seemed to be reserved for ever. But in the clods of the earth-among its unconsidered people- there lay forces to which even mist and storm gave energy; and still over all there shone the light of Him whose strength is in the clouds. The vigour of a nation lies, at all times, in the character and action of the common body of its people. The highest genius, which implies good sense, true insight, and quick sympathy, must draw its sustenance from the surrounding world of man and Nature. When it mistakes, if it ever can mistake, the conventional life of a court for the soul of a nation, seeking to strike root down into that only and draw support from that, it must be as good seed fallen among stones. When it mistakes, if it ever can mistake, the mere dust of the high road, the day's fashions blown about by every wind, for source of life, it dies under the feet of the next comer. The good soil is everywhere in the minds of men. Culture may be confined to a few patches, but everywhere in the common ground lies that of which fruit shall come.

2. When Chaucer died, in the year 1400, the first printers were unborn. John Gutenberg may, indeed, have been an infant in the first year of the fifteenth century. John Faust was not born until three years after Chaucer's death; and his son-in-law, Peter Schoeffer, was some twenty years younger than Faust.

In Spain the Moors held Granada, and the Christians were