his abstraction, his love of study.  “Thou lookest as thou wouldest find an hare,” laughs the host, “and ever on the ground I see thee stare.”  He heard little of his neighbours’ talk when office work in Thames Street was over.  “Thou goest home to thy own house anon, and also dumb as any stone thou sittest at another book till fully dazed is thy look, and livest thus as an heremite, although,” he adds slyly, “thy abstinence is lite,” or little.  But of this seeming abstraction from the world about him there is not a trace in Chaucer’s verse.  We see there how keen his observation was, how vivid and intense his sympathy with nature and the men among whom he moved.  “Farewell, my book,” he cried as spring came after winter and the lark’s song roused him at dawn to spend hours gazing alone on the daisy whose beauty he sang.  But field and stream and flower and bird, much as he loved them, were less to him than man.  No poetry was over more human than Chaucer’s, none ever came more frankly and genially home to men than his “Canterbury Tales.”

It was the continuation and revision of this work which mainly occupied him during the years from 1384 to 1391.  Its best stories, those of the Miller, the Reeve, the Cook, the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Friar, the Nun, the Priest, and the Pardoner, are ascribed to this period, as well as the Prologue.  The framework which Chaucer chose—­that of a pilgrimage from London to Canterbury—­not only enabled him to string these tales together, but lent itself admirably to the peculiar characteristics of his poetic temper, his dramatic versatility and the universality of his sympathy.  His tales cover the whole field of mediaeval poetry; the legend of the priest, the knightly romance, the wonder-tale of the traveller, the broad humour of the fabliau, allegory and apologue, all are there.  He finds a yet wider scope for his genius in the persons who tell these stories, the thirty pilgrims who start in the May morning from the Tabard in Southwark—­thirty distinct figures, representatives of every class of English society from the noble to the ploughman.  We see the “verray perfight gentil knight” in cassock and coat of mail, with his curly-headed squire beside him, fresh as the May morning, and behind them the brown-faced yeoman in his coat and hood of green with a mighty bow in his hand.  A group of ecclesiastics light up for us the mediaeval church—­the brawny hunt-loving monk, whose bridle jingles as loud and clear as the chapel-bell—­the wanton friar, first among the beggars and harpers of the country-side—­the poor parson, threadbare, learned, and devout, ("Christ’s lore and his apostles twelve he taught, and first he followed it himself")—­the summoner with his fiery face—­the pardoner with his wallet “bretfull of pardons, come from Rome all hot”—­the lively prioress with her courtly French lisp, her soft little red mouth, and “Amor vincit omnia” graven on her brooch.  Learning is there in the portly