hat the "Host" feels justified in
offering up a thanksgiving to Bacchus for his powers of conciliation.
The "Man of Law's" Prologue is an argument; the "Wife of Bath's" the
ceaseless clatter of an indomitable tongue. The sturdy "Franklin"
corrects himself when deviating into circumlocution:--

Till that the brighte sun had lost his hue,
For th' horizon had reft the sun of light,
(This is as much to say as: it was night).

The "Miller" "tells his churlish tale in his manner," of which manner
the less said the better; while in the "Reeve's Tale," Chaucer even,
after the manner of a comic dramatist, gives his Northern undergraduate
a vulgar ungrammatical phraseology, probably designedly, since the poet
was himself a "Southern man." The "Pardoner" is exuberant in his
sample-eloquence; the "Doctor of Physic" is gravely and sententiously
moral--

--a proper man,
And like a prelate, by Saint Runyan,

says the "Host." Most sustained of all, though he tells no tale, is,
from the nature of the case, the character of Harry Bailly, the host of
the Tabard, himself--who, whatever resemblance he may bear to his
actual original, is the anecestor of a long line of descendants,
including mine Host of the Garter in the "Merry Wives of Windsor." He
is a thorough worldling, to whom anything smacking of the precisian in
morals is as offensive as anything of a Romantic tone in literature; he
smells a Lollard without fail, and turns up his nose at an
old-fashioned ballad or a string of tragic instances as out of date or
tedious. In short, he speaks his mind and that of other more timid
people at the same time, and is one of those sinners whom everybody
both likes and respects. "I advise," says the "Pardoner," with polite
impudence (when inviting the company to become purchasers of the holy
wares which he has for sale), that

--our host, he shall begin,
For he is most enveloped in sin.

He is thus both an admirable picture in himself, and an admirable foil
to those characters which are most unlike him--above all to the
"Parson" and the "Clerk of Oxford," the representatives of religion and
learning.

As to the "Tales" themselves, Chaucer beyond a doubt meant their style
and tone to be above all things POPULAR. This is one of the causes
accounting for the favour shown to the work,--a favour attested, so far
as earlier times are concerned, by the vast number of manuscripts
existing of it. The "Host" is, so to speak