Chaucer’s early poems have music and fancy, they are full of a natural delight in sunshine and the greenness of foliage; but they have little human interest.  They are allegories for the most part, more or less satisfactorily wrought out.  The allegorical turn of thought, the delight in pageantry, the “clothing upon” of abstractions with human forms, flowered originally out of chivalry and the feudal times.  Chaucer imported it from the French, and was proud of it in his early poems, as a young fellow of that day might be proud of his horse furniture, his attire, his waving plume.  And the poetic fashion thus set retained its vitality for a long while,—­indeed, it was only thoroughly made an end of by the French Revolution, which made an end of so much else.  About the last trace of its influence is to be found in Burns’ sentimental correspondence with Mrs. M’Lehose, in which the lady is addressed as Clarinda, and the poet signs himself Sylvander.  It was at best a mere beautiful gauze screen drawn between the poet and nature; and passion put his foot through it at once.  After Chaucer’s youth was over, he discarded somewhat scornfully these abstractions and shows of things.  The “Flower and the Leaf” is a beautiful-tinted dream; the “Canterbury Tales” are as real as anything in Shakspeare or Burns.  The ladies in the earlier poems dwell in forests, and wear coronals on their heads; the people in the “Tales” are engaged in the actual concerns of life, and you can see the splashes of mire upon their clothes.  The separate poems which make up the “Canterbury Tales” were probably written at different periods, after youth was gone, and when he had fallen out of love with florid imagery and allegorical conceits; and we can fancy him, perhaps fallen on evil days and in retirement, anxious to gather up these loose efforts into one consummate whole.  If of his flowers he would make a bouquet for posterity, it was of course necessary to procure a string to tie them together.  These necessities, which ruin other men, are the fortunate chances of great poets.  Then it was that the idea arose of a meeting of pilgrims at the Tabard in Southwark, of their riding to Canterbury, and of the different personages relating stories to beguile the tedium of the journey.  The notion was a happy one, and the execution is superb.  In those days, as we know, pilgrimages were of frequent occurrence; and in the motley group that congregated on such occasions, the painter of character had full scope.  All conditions of people are comprised in the noisy band issuing from the courtyard of the Southwark inn on that May morning in the fourteenth century.  Let us go nearer, and have a look at them.