them ridiculous.  The same naturalness and humor which marked “Don Quixote” and the “Decameron” also are seen in the “Canterbury Tales.”  Chaucer freed himself from all the affectations and extravagances and artificiality which characterized the poetry of the Middle Ages.  With him began a new style in writing.  He and Wyclif are the creators of English literature.  They did not create a language, but they formed and polished it.

The various persons who figure in the “Canterbury Tales” are too well known for me to enlarge upon.  Who can add anything to the Prologue in which Chaucer himself describes the varied characters and habits and appearance of the pilgrims to the shrine of Thomas a Becket at Canterbury?  There are thirty of these pilgrims, including the poet himself, embracing nearly all the professions and trades then known, except the higher dignitaries of Church and State, who are not supposed to mix freely in ordinary intercourse, and whom it would be unwise to paint in their marked peculiarities.  The most prominent person, as to social standing, is probably the knight.  He is not a nobleman, but he has fought in many battles, and has travelled extensively.  His cassock is soiled, and his horse is strong but not gay,—­a very respectable man, courteous and gallant, a soldier corresponding to a modern colonel or captain.  His son, the esquire, is a youth of twenty, with curled locks and embroidered dress, shining in various colors like the flowers of May, gay as a bird, active as a deer, and gentle as a maiden.  The yeoman who attends them both is clad in green like a forester, with arrows and feathers, bearing the heavy sword and buckler of his master.  The prioress is another respectable person, coy and simple, with dainty fingers, small mouth, and clean attire,—­a refined sort of a woman for that age, ornamented with corals and brooch, so stately as to be held in reverence, yet so sentimental as to weep for a mouse caught in a trap:  all characteristic of a respectable, kind-hearted lady who has lived in seclusion.  A monk, of course, in the fourteenth century was everywhere to be seen; and a monk we have among the pilgrims, riding a “dainty” horse, accompanied with greyhounds, loving fur trimmings on his Benedictine habit and a fat swan to roast.  The friar, too, we see,—­a mendicant, yet merry and full of dalliances, beloved by the common women, to whom he gave easy absolution; a jolly vagabond, who knew all the taverns, and who carried on his portly person pins and songs and relics to sell or to give away.  And there was the merchant, with forked beard and Flemish beaver hat and neatly clasped boots, bragging of his gains and selling French crowns, but on the whole a worthy man.  The Oxford clerk or scholar is one of the company, silent and sententious, as lean as the horse on which he rode, with thread-bare coat, and books of Aristotle and his philosophy which he valued more than gold, of which indeed he could boast but little,—­a man anxious to learn,