s still among the living, the philosophical Strode in his
Dominican habit, on a visit to London from one of his monasteries;
or--more probably--the youthful Lydgate, not yet a Benedictine monk,
but pausing, on his return from his travels in divers lands, to sit
awhile, as it were, at the feet of the master in whose poetic example
he took pride; the courtly Scogan; and Occleve, already learned, who
was to cherish the memory of Chaucer's outward features as well as of
his fruitful intellect:--all these may in his closing days have
gathered around their friend; and perhaps one or the other may have
been present to close the watchful eyes for ever.

But there was yet another company with which, in these last years, and
perhaps in these last days of his life, Chaucer had intercourse, of
which he can rarely have lost sight, and which even in solitude he must
have had constantly with him. This company has since been well known
to generations and centuries of Englishmen. Its members head that
goodly procession of figures which have been familiar to our fathers as
livelong friends, which are the same to us, and will be to our children
after us--the procession of the nation's favourites among the
characters created by our great dramatists and novelists, the eternal
types of human nature which nothing can efface from our imagination.
Or is there less reality about the "Knight" in his short cassock and
old-fashioned armour and the "Wife of Bath" in hat and wimple,
than--for instance--about Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman? Can we not
hear "Madame Eglantine" lisping her "Stratford-atte-Bowe" French as if
she were a personage in a comedy by Congreve or Sheridan? Is not the
"Summoner" with his "fire-red cherubim's face" a worthy companion for
Lieutenant Bardolph himself? And have not the humble "Parson" and his
Brother the "Ploughman" that irresistible pathos which Dickens could
find in the simple and the poor? All these figures, with those of
their fellow-pilgrims, are to us living men and women; and in their
midst the poet who created them lives, as he has painted himself among
the company, not less faithfully than Occleve depicted him from memory
after death.

How long Chaucer had been engaged upon the "Canterbury Tales" it is
impossible to decide. No process is more hazardous than that of
distributing a poet's works among the several periods of his life
according to divisions of species--placing his tragedies or serious
st