THE CANTERBURY TALES.* EVERY lover of our " first warbler"

will give a glad welcome to the volume of selections from his tales which has just been added to the "Parchment Library." The merits of this series of classics are so well known to book-lovers, that perhaps no further or higher recommendation is needed of this, the most recent addition to it, than to say that in excellence of type and paper it is fully equal to its predecessors. Mr. Pollard furnishes a lively and entertaining introduction, giving us some account of the poet's life and the principal tales, as also of the various sources to which Chaucer was indebted for them. Those who have as yet to make the acquaintance of the poet, will find all the requisite information as to the accentuation of his un- defiled" English in the brief note which immediately follows the introduction, and there is a very complete glossary of the obsolete words at the end of the volume. Mr. Pollard appears to differ from Coleridge, who thought a slight alteration of Chaucer's text advisable for the sake of " restoring so great a poet to his ancient and most deserved popularity," and makes only the concession to what he justly terms " modern laziness" of adopting the easiest reading from seven good manuscripts. We venture to think this the wisest coarse, in the interests of poet, editor, and reader ; and with the helps here given to the fall understanding and enjoyment of the text, there can no longer be any valid excuse for ignorance of the masterpiece of one to whom so competent a judge as Mr. Lowellt has not scrupled to assign the second place in the glorious band of English singers. In Chaucer's poetry there is certainly every element of popularity save one, the obsoleteness of its language constituting the sole obstacle to its universal appreciation. And the difficulties of this appear to us to have been greatly ex- aggerated. Moat readers, we fancy, are repelled at the outset from the study of Chaucer by the unusual quantity of un- familiar words which they find in the Prologue to the Tales. Yet a little patience—not much more, indeed, than is required by an Englishman for the complete apprehension of such a poem, for example, as "The Jolly Beggars" of Barns—would enable them to master the difficulties of this Prologue ; and the reading of the stories which follow would then be found one of the lightest and pleasantest of tasks, if such reading can rightly be described as a task at all. The superabundance of obsolete words in the Prologue, and the comparative freedom from them in the narratives, may be accounted for by the fact that while the stories are mainly of " olden " days and other climes, the Prologue is ex- clusively devoted to the delineation of contemporary and national character, manners, and costume, necessitating the employ- ment of terms familiar only to Englishmen of that period. Yet the exceptional difficulty of the language of the Prologue is amply compensated by the peculiar charm and interest of the subject for us. For here, in a compass of little more than eight hundred lines, we have a picture of life and character in that far-off fourteenth century which would otherwise have been so dim to ns, more complete and comprehensive than any other picture of life and character in any other period presented to us, in a single work, by any subsequent poet, dramatist, or novelist. The band of pilgrims to which Chaucer introduces us is com- posed of persons in all ranks of life, and their lineaments are impartially drawn for us by the hand of a master who, if not first, certainly belongs to that highest class of delineators of human character whose acknowledged chiefs are Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Scott. Chaucer's claims are not, perhaps, so universally allowed as theirs ; yet few, we venture to think, who really value his writings would rank him below the last two of these great masters. In his narrative power, his eye for the picturesque in dress as well as in manners (for he is particular as to the costume of each of his pilgrims), his love of chivalrous sentiment and action, his unobtrusive

• Chaucer's Canterbury Tates. Edited by Alfred W. Pollard. London : Kegan Paul* Trench, and Co. 1886. t In his essay on " Dryden."

humour and irrepressible gaiety of heart, he is more akin, perhaps, to Scott than to Shakespeare, with whom he has been more often compared. He has been, not unjustly, called the founder of the domestic novel.

While, as William Blake has observed, and as many writers since have repeated, " the characters of Chanter's pilgrims are the characters which compose all ages and nations," there is always some individual trait given which differentiates them from any similar character of our own acquaintance, and in- clines us strongly to the belief that the portrait of each pilgrim is sketched from some particular person well known to the poet. Who can doubt, for instance, that there really existed in the fourteenth century, that " stout carl," the Miller, big of brawn and bones, a uniformly successful wrestler, short-shouldered and broad, able to break a door with his head, wearing a beard as red as a sow or fox and broad as a spade, his nose graced with a wart, on which stood "a tuft of hairs red as the bristles of a sow's ears," his nostrils black and wide, his month wide as a great furnace, a "good " stealer of corn, bearing a sword and buckler by his side, clothed in a white coat and blue hood, and blowing lustily a bagpipe with which " he brought us out of town ?" There is obviously a touch of humorous exaggeration in this picture, yet every reader must feel that a veritable " jolly miller," contemporary with the poet, is here, in the main, faithfully limned for us. Nor are the other characters in the Prologue depicted with less felicity and accuracy of observation. There is no need to give other examples, for who has not heard of the Wife of Bath ; the good " poor parson," the prototype of Goldsmith's ; the Shipman of Dartmouth, whose " beard had been shaken with many a tempest ;" or the hollow and sober-looking Clerk of Oxford, addicted to logic, riding a horse "as lean as is a rake," without a benefice, and though a philosopher, having " bat little gold in coffer," and praying " busily " for the souls of them that gave him wherewith to acquire learning ?

Mr. Pollard's selection contains, besides the Prologue, the tales of the Knight, the Man of Law, the Prioress, and the Clerk. The lover of Chaucer will therefore miss much that he would fain have seen retained, though the four stories selected are certainly among the very best related by the pilgrims, and the reader who should not care for what is here given is not likely to be better pleased with anything else in Chaucer. The four stories are serious, and partly tragic in subject ; yet that sly humour which is peculiar to the poet is never wholly absent from them. In these tales, indeed—which, it will be observed, are all related by the " gentles "—we have Chaucer's humour at its best, for here it never degenerates into buffoonery and coarse satire, as it is apt to do in the tales of his clowns.

Though Chanter's satire has generally been spoken of as kindly and good-humoured, a French critic has discovered in it some- thing of the bitterness which characterises that of Rabelais ; and certainly the Wife of Bath's sarcastic reflections on the " limitoures and other holy freres," and the self-revelations of the Pardoner might have been penned by him who described for us the " Ringing Island." Yet, in the case of the Pardoner,

the poet appears to have felt a touch of remorse, and restores

him to something of his proper dignity by putting into his month the weird and powerful, and in some respects even sublime, story of "Death and the Rioters." This story is men- tioned by Mr. Pollard in his introduction, but, unhappily, is not included in the selected tales.

One great charm of Chaucer's poetry is its boyish, almost infantile character. This is no doubt duo in some measure to his language, which for us has something of the ineffable charm which belongs to the lisp of children. Yet the spirit of his poetry corresponds entirely with the language, and hence we cannot agree with those who regard him as one " born out of

his due time." No other language than that which he wrote would have suited so exactly his character and temperament.

Chaucer combines the innocent frankness and gaiety of the child

with the prudent reserve and serious reflection of the man of the world ; and even when he utters naughty things, we feel, as he

himself so naïvely says, that "no villainy is it." He is deeply pathetic at times ; yet his smiles, like those of the child to whom we have compared him, seldom fail to shine through his tears.

In his poetry there is nothing of that morbid melancholy which

first found complete expression in Sackville's Induction to the Mirror• for Magistrates, and has coloured so much of our poetry

since. Perhaps the nearest approach he ever made to it was in the old man's supplication, in the " Pardoneres Tale," to his leve mother," the earth, to let him in, that his bones might be at rest.

Though Chaucer could not have boasted with Swift that he "to steal a hint was never known," he might at least have said that whatever he stole he made his own by his fresh and free treatment of it. The justly celebrated line in the " Knightes Tale,"

" The smiler with the knif under the cloke,"

is but a paraphrase of Statins's " Occaltis ensibus adatant insidias ;" yet who does not perceive its superior picturesqueness and expressiveness P The story, too, of patient Grisilde, which Chaucer's " Clerke " borrows from Petrarca, is told in such artless yet exquisitely modulated verse, and with such imagina- tive insight, tenderness, delicacy, and pathos, that, for our part, we cannot help regarding the heroine as more exclusively Chaucer's than Petrarca's or Boccaccio's. Though submissive, she is never abject, and she preserves throughout her womanly dignity and fortitude, justifying the poet's enlogium :—

"Bat though this mayden tendre were of age, Yet in the bred of her virginitee

There was enclosed ripe and sad corage."

And what a picture of the peasant girl's virgin purity and sweetness has Chaucer given us in the following stanza !-

" Bat for to speak of vertuons beautee, Than was she one the fairest under Bonne; Pal ponrely yfostred up was she :

No likerons lust was in hire herte yronne ; Wel offer of the well than of the tonne She dranke, and for she wolde vertue plate, She knew well labour, but non idel ese."

We should like to quote more from Mr. Pollard's little volume of selections, but the limits of apace forbid us to do so. We hope the volume may be so well received by the " general reader" as to induce the editor to give us the rest of The Canterbury Tales in the same commodious and elegant form. The nature of the poet is revealed in his writings, and the more closely the latter are studied, the more will the man, as well as the poet, win upon us. No poet is more deeply beloved by those who know him than Chaucer ; none, perhaps, so much, except Shakespeare and Scott. And though the author of Don Juan might affect to be disgusted with Chaucer's obscenity, almost every other great poet—even the austere Wordsworth—has joined in the cheery laughter of the author of The Canterbury Tales.