ck, in anticipation of poor fare, the
fatigue of travel, and perhaps a fast or two not set down in the calendar.
As soon as they attack the viands, ale and strong wines, hippocras,
pigment, and claret, are served in bright pewter and wood. There were
Saxon drinks for the commoner pilgrims; the claret was for the knight.
Every one drinks at his will, and the miller, as we shall see, takes a
little more than his head can decently carry.

First in the place of honor is the knight, accompanied by his son, the
young squire, and his trusty yeoman. Then, in order of social rank, a
prioress, a nun and three priests, a friar, a merchant, a poor scholar or
clerk of Oxford, a sergeant of the law, a frankelein, a haberdasher, a
weaver, a tapster, a dyer, a cook, a shipman, a doctor of physic, a wife
of Bath, a poor parson, a ploughman, a miller, a manciple or college
steward, a reeve or bailiff, a sompnour or summoner to the ecclesiastical
courts, a pardoner or seller of papal indulgences (one hundred and fifty
years before Luther)--an essentially English company of many social
grades, bound to the most popular shrine, that of a Saxon archbishop,
himself the son of a London citizen, murdered two hundred years before
with the connivance of an English king. No one can read this list without
thinking that if Chaucer be true and accurate in his descriptions of these
persons, and make them talk as they did talk, his delineations are of
inestimable value historically. He has been faithfully true. Like all
great masters of the epic art, he doubtless drew them from the life; each,
given in the outlines of the prologue, is a speaking portrait: even the
horses they ride are as true to nature as those in the pictures of Rosa
Bonheur.

And besides these historic delineations which mark the age and country,
notwithstanding the loss of local and personal satire with which, to the
reader of his day, the poem must have sparkled, and which time has
destroyed for us, the features of our common humanity are so well
portrayed, that to the latest generations will be there displayed the
"forth-showing instances" of the _Idola Tribus_ of Bacon, the besetting
sins, frailties, and oddities of the human race.

SATIRE.--His touches of satire and irony are as light as the hits of an
accomplished master of the small-sword; mere hits, but significant of deep
thrusts, at the scandals, abuses, and oppressions of the age. Like
Dickens, he employed his fiction