greatness of his imagination cannot make living to us. It has often
been said that Dante is the greatest and most representative artist of
the Middle Ages, but so far as this is true, and it is only partially
true, it may make plain to us that there are no boundaries of time in
art any more than of race or country. Dante is the first great artist of
a new world, but it was not till three centuries had passed, it was not
until Shakespeare, that the whole meaning of the new literature was made
clear. The new literature has been thought to begin with two great
artists, an Italian and an Englishman: with Boccaccio in the south and
Chaucer in the north.

What is, then, the characteristic quality or note of the _Decameron_ and
the _Canterbury Tales_? It is not, as some absurd persons think, to be
discovered in the licentiousness or grossness of some of these tales,
this only represents one aspect of their realism, and indeed in this
they do little more than continue the characteristics of what we know as
the 'Fabliaux' of the Middle Ages. The quality of the new art lies just
in this, that there is nothing in human life which is uninteresting or
insignificant to these great artists, that they are bound by no
traditions, hampered by no conventions. They had begun as artists of
romance, and the romantic sentiment of life never ceased to interest
and move them, but they had learned to go beyond the romantic
conventions, and to find the material of their art in everything which
was part of the reality of life. To them, as to the other tale-writers
of these centuries, it was quite immaterial whether they were retelling
a story which had come down from immemorial antiquity, or relating
something which had happened but yesterday in their own town or village,
and they knew nothing of distinctions of class or rank or circumstance;
it is the universal human interest which arrests them. The example which
we shall find most representative is that which is to us English people
the most familiar, that is the 'Prologue' to the _Canterbury Tales_. Was
there ever anything greater of its kind than this? Who can ever forget
these figures: the Knight, the Franklyn, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath?
As we read there passes before us all the company of human life, wise
and foolish, grave and gay, good and bad. Chaucer and Boccaccio are the
greatest artists of what has often been called the 'realistic' type,
they are at least very easy to distinguish f