But Chaucer's workmanship was as admirable as his selection of his
framework was felicitous. He has executed only part of his scheme,
according to which each pilgrim was to tell two tales both going and
coming, and the best narrator, the laureate of this merry company, was
to be rewarded by a supper at the common expense on their return to
their starting-place. Thus the design was, not merely to string
together a number of poetical tales by an easy thread, but to give a
real unity and completeness to the whole poem. All the tales told by
all the pilgrims were to be connected together by links; the reader was
to take an interest in the movement and progress of the journey to and
fro; and the poem was to have a middle as well as a beginning and an
end:--the beginning being the inimitable "Prologue" as it now stands;
the middle the history of the pilgrims' doings at Canterbury; and the
close their return and farewell celebration at the Tabard inn. Though
Chaucer carried out only about a fourth part of this plan, yet we can
see, as clearly as if the whole poem lay before us in a completed form,
that its most salient feature was intended to lie in the variety of its
characters.

Each of these characters is distinctly marked out in itself, while at
the same time it is designed as the type of a class. This very obvious
criticism of course most readily admits of being illustrated by the
"Prologue"--a gallery of genre-portraits which many master-hands have
essayed to reproduce with pen or with pencil. Indeed one lover of
Chaucer sought to do so with both--poor gifted Blake, whose descriptive
text of his picture of the Canterbury Pilgrims Charles Lamb, with the
loving exaggeration in which he was at times fond of indulging,
pronounced the finest criticism on Chaucer's poem he had ever read.
But it should be likewise noticed that the character of each pilgrim is
kept up through the poem, both incidentally in the connecting passages
between tale and tale, and in the manner in which the tales themselves
are introduced and told. The connecting passages are full of dramatic
vivacity; in these the "Host," Master Harry Bailly, acts as a most
efficient choragus, but the other pilgrims are not silent, and in the
"Manciple's" Prologue, the "Cook" enacts a bit of downright farce for
the amusement of the company and of stray inhabitants of
"Bob-up-and-down." He is, however, homoeopathically cured of the
effects of his drunkenness, so t