In Chaucer’s earlier works, such as the translation of the Romaunt of the Rose (if that be his), the Boke of the Duchesse, the Parlament of Foules, the Hous of Fame, as well as in the Legend of Good Women, which was later, the inspiration of the French court poetry of the 13th and 14th centuries is manifest.  He retains in them the mediaeval machinery of allegories and dreams, the elaborate descriptions of palaces, temples, portraitures, etc., which had been made fashionable in France by such poems as Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose, and Jean Machault’s La Fontaine Amoureuse.  In some of these the influence of Italian poetry is also perceptible.  There are suggestions from Dante, for example, in the Parlament of Foules and the Hous of Fame, and Troilus and Cresseide is a free handling rather than a translation of Boccaccio’s Filostrato.  In all of these there are passages of great beauty and force.  Had Chaucer written nothing else, he would still have been remembered as the most accomplished English poet of his time, but he would not have risen to the rank which he now occupies, as one of the greatest English poets of all time.  This position he owes to his masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales.  Here he abandoned the imitation of foreign models and the artificial literary fashions of his age, and wrote of real life from his own ripe knowledge of men and things.

The Canterbury Tales are a collection of stories written at different times, but put together, probably, toward the close of his life.  The frame-work into which they are fitted is one of the happiest ever devised.  A number of pilgrims who are going on horseback to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket, at Canterbury, meet at the Tabard Inn, in Southwark, a suburb of London.  The jolly host of the Tabard, Harry Bailey, proposes that on their way to Canterbury, each of the company shall tell two tales, and two more on their way back, and that the one who tells the best shall have a supper at the cost of the rest when they return to the inn.  He himself accompanies them as judge and “reporter.”  In the setting of the stories there is thus a constant feeling of movement and the air of all outdoors.  The little “head-links” and “end-links” which bind them together give incidents of the journey and glimpses of the talk of the pilgrims, sometimes amounting, as in the prologue of the Wife of Bath, to full and almost dramatic character-sketches.  The stories, too, are dramatically suited to the narrators.  The general prologue is a series of such character-sketches, the most perfect in English poetry.  The portraits of the pilgrims are illuminated with the soft brilliancy and the minute loving fidelity of the miniatures in the old missals, and with the same quaint precision in traits of expression and in costume.  The pilgrims are not all such as one would meet nowadays at an English inn.  The presence of a knight, a squire,