is companions, who become more
serious as they approach the holy city, that he commences, for the good
of their souls, his ample "meditation." The coarse story told by the
miller had been justified by excuses no less appropriate to the person
and to the circumstances; the person was a clown, and chanced to be
drunk; now the person is a saint, and, as it happens, they are just
nearing the place of pilgrimage.

The good sense which caused the poet to write his "Canterbury Tales"
according to a plan so conformable to reason and to nature, is one of
the most eminent of Chaucer's qualities. It reveals itself in the
details as in the whole scheme, and inspires him, in the midst of his
most fanciful inventions, with reassuring remarks which show that earth
and real life are not far away, and that we are not in danger of falling
from the clouds. He reminds us at an opportune moment that there is a
certain nobility, the highest of all, which cannot be bequeathed in a
will; that the corrupt specimens of a social class should not cause the
whole class to be condemned:

Of every ordre som shrewe is, parde;[547]

that, in the education of children, parents should be careful not to
treat them too soon as men; if one takes them to merry-makings before
time, they become "to sone rype and bold, ... which is ful perilous." He
expresses himself very freely about great captains, each of whom would
have been called "an outlawe or a theef" had they done less harm.[548]
This last idea is put forth in a few lines of a humour so truly English
that it is impossible not to think of Swift and Fielding; and, indeed,
Fielding can the more appropriately be named here as he has devoted all
his novel of "Jonathan Wild the Great" to the expounding of exactly the
same thesis.

Finally, we owe to this same common sense of Chaucer's a thing more
remarkable yet: namely, that with his knowledge of Latin and of French,
and living in a circle where those two languages were in great favour,
he wrote solely in English. His prose, like his verse, his "Treatise on
the Astrolabe" like his tales, are in English. He belongs to the English
nation, and that is why he writes in that language; a reason of that
sort is sufficient for him: "Suffyse to thee thise trewe conclusiouns in
English, as wel as suffyseth to thise noble clerkes Grekes thise same
conclusiouns in Greek, and to Arabians in Arabik, and to Jewes in Ebrew,
and to the Latin folk in Latin." Chaucer,