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 delightfully humorous and life-like.  He is the kindliest of satirists.  The knavery, greed, and hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers of indulgences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by Langland and Wiclif, though his mood is not, like theirs, one of stern, moral indignation, but rather the good-natured scorn of a man of the world.  His charity is broad enough to cover even the corrupt sompnour, of whom he says,

  And yet in sooth he was a good felawe.