ch as
one would meet nowadays at an English inn. The presence of a knight, a
squire, a yeoman archer, and especially of so many kinds of
ecclesiastics, a nun, a friar, a monk, a pardoner, and a sompnour or
apparitor, reminds us that the England of that day must have been less
like Protestant England, as we know it, than like the Italy of some
fifty years ago. But however the outward face of society may have
changed, the Canterbury pilgrims remain, in Chaucer's descriptions,
living and universal types of human nature. The _Canterbury Tales_ are
twenty-four in number. There were thirty-two pilgrims, so that if
finished as designed the whole collection would have numbered one
hundred and twenty-eight stories.

Chaucer is the bright consummate flower of the English Middle Age. Like
many another great poet he put the final touch to the various literary
forms that he found in cultivation. Thus his _Knight's Tale_, based upon
Boccaccio's _Teseide_, is the best of English mediaeval romances. And yet
the _Rime of Sir Thopas_, who goes seeking an elf queen for his mate,
and is encountered by the giant Sir Olifaunt, burlesques these same
romances with their impossible adventures and their tedious rambling
descriptions. The tales of the prioress and the second nun are saints'
legends. The _Monk's Tale_ is a set of dry, moral apologues in the
manner of his contemporary, the "moral Gower." The stories told by the
reeve, miller, friar, sompnour, shipman, and merchant belong to the
class of _fabliaux_, a few of which existed in English, such as _Dame
Siriz_, the _Lay of the Ash_, and the _Land of Cokaygne_, already
mentioned. The _Nonne Preste's Tale_, likewise, which Dryden modernized
with admirable humor, was of the class of _fabliaux_, and was suggested
by a little poem in forty lines, _Dou Coc et Werpil_, by Marie de
France, a Norman poetess of the 13th century. It belonged, like the
early English poem of _The Fox and the Wolf_, to the popular animal saga
of _Reynard the Fox_. The _Franklin's Tale_, whose scene is Brittany,
and the _Wife of Bath's Tale_ which is laid in the time of the British
Arthur, belong to the class of French _lais_, serious metrical tales
shorter than the romance and of Breton origin, the best representatives
of which are the elegant and graceful _lais_ of Marie de France.

Chaucer was our first great master of laughter and of tears. His serious
poetry is full of the tenderest pathos. His loosest tales are