Middle Ages,--a period of uncontrolled imagination, of
unsubstantial creations, of external appearances copied without
reflection. In his "Canterbury Tales" he belongs to the present,--when
Reason asserts her authority, gives the stamp of individual reality to
the characters of fiction, and studies the man himself behind his
outward and visible form.

The creations of romantic fiction were unreal beings distinguished by
different names, by the different insignia on their shields, and by the
degree in which they possessed the special qualities which formed the
ideal of mediaeval times. The story of their lives was but a series of
adventures, strung together without plan, the overflow of an active but
ungoverned imagination. The pilgrims to the shrine of Canterbury are
men and women, genuine flesh and blood, as thoroughly individual and
distinct as the creations of Shakespeare and of Fielding. They dress,
they talk, each one after his own manner and according to his position
in life, telling a story appropriate to his disposition and suitable to
his experience. The knight, with armor battered in "mortal battailles"
with the Infidel, describes the adventures of Palamon and Arcite, a
tale of chivalry. The lusty young squire, bearing himself well, "in
hope to stonden in his lady grace," tells an Eastern tale of love and
romance. The prioress, "all conscience and tendre herte," relates the
legend of "litel flew of Lincoln," murdered by the Jews for singing his
hymn to the Virgin. The clerk of Oxford, who prefers to wealth and
luxury his "twenty bookes clad in blak or reede," contributes the story
of the patient Griselda.

The "Canterbury Tales" are so familiar that an extended notice of them
here would be superfluous, especially as we are dealing with narratives
in prose form. But in seeking to trace the origin and progress of the
English novel as it is now written, we must record the first appearance
of its special characteristics in the works of Chaucer. Here are first
to be seen real human beings, endowed with human virtues and subject to
human frailties; here fictitious characters are first represented amid
the homely scenes of daily life; here they first become living
realities whose nature and dispositions every one may understand, and
with whose thoughts every one may sympathize. We must notice, also, the
significant fact that of the thirty-two pilgrims who jogged along
together that April day, four were of a militar