person of the doctor of physic, rich with the profits of the pestilence—­the busy serjeant-of-law, “that ever seemed busier than he was”—­the hollow-cheeked clerk of Oxford with his love of books and short sharp sentences that disguise a latent tenderness which breaks out at last in the story of Griseldis.  Around them crowd types of English industry:  the merchant; the franklin in whose house “it snowed of meat and drink”; the sailor fresh from frays in the Channel; the buxom wife of Bath; the broad-shouldered miller; the haberdasher, carpenter, weaver, dyer, tapestry-maker, each in the livery of his craft; and last the honest ploughman who would dyke and delve for the poor without hire.  It is the first time in English poetry that we are brought face to face not with characters or allegories or reminiscences of the past, but with living and breathing men, men distinct in temper and sentiment as in face or costume or mode of speech; and with this distinctness of each maintained throughout the story by a thousand shades of expression and action.  It is the first time, too, that we meet with the dramatic power which not only creates each character but combines it with its fellows, which not only adjusts each tale or jest to the temper of the person who utters it but fuses all into a poetic unity.  It is life in its largeness, its variety, its complexity, which surrounds us in the “Canterbury Tales.”  In some of the stories indeed, which were composed no doubt at an earlier time, there is the tedium of the old romance or the pedantry of the schoolman; but taken as a whole the poem is the work not of a man of letters but of a man of action.  Chaucer has received his training from war, courts, business, travel—­a training not of books but of life.  And it is life that he loves—­the delicacy of its sentiment, the breadth of its farce, its laughter and its tears, the tenderness of its Griseldis or the Smollett-like adventures of the miller and the clerks.  It is this largeness of heart, this wide tolerance, which enables him to reflect man for us as none but Shakspere has ever reflected him, and to do this with a pathos, a shrewd sense and kindly humour, a freshness and joyousness of feeling, that even Shakspere has not surpassed.

[Sidenote:  The French Marriage]

The last ten years of Chaucer’s life saw a few more tales added to the Pilgrimage and a few poems to his work; but his power was lessening, and in 1400 he rested from his labours in his last home, a house in the garden of St. Mary’s Chapel at Westminster.  His body rests within the Abbey church.  It was strange that such a voice should have awakened no echo in the singers that follow, but the first burst of English song died as suddenly in Chaucer as the hope and glory of his age.  He died indeed at the moment of a revolution which was the prelude to years of national discord and national suffering.  Whatever may have been the grounds of his action, the rule of Richard the Second after his assumption of power had shown