Teutonic but a Latin language. But a language is, above all other things, the possession of the common people. It grows chiefly from their usage, and not from that of the schools of the technically learned nor from the courts. In spite of the dominance of Latin and French in schools and court, by the middle of the fourteenth century the language which had come down through many vicissitudes and with many changes from the Anglo-Saxons had become recognized as fit for even a “gentleman" to speak and write. This language Chaucer used so finely and so energetically that the language of the common people in and about London, the Midland dialect, became the standard speech of the English race.

His lesser works. The chief product of the early days of Chaucer's career as a poet was his translation of the Romance of the Rose, a French poem of the greatest days of the medieval period, and originally written during the wonderful century preceding Chaucer, probably at least a hundred years before his day. This beautiful poem is an allegory of Love, and is filled with serious and satirical subtleties. His translation has been lost, so we are not interested in it as a translation; but in its effects we are greatly interested, for it had a more profound effect upon its translator than all the court life, all the continental residence, all the literature of medieval Italy, or all the literature of the ancient classical age. It gave him suggestions of the forms which he should employ in his own productions, and it molded forever his attitude to life.

The next of the important works of Chaucer is the Troilus and Criseyde, not a translation, as it is often called, but a thorough remaking of an epic by Boccaccio, the story-writer of fourteenthcentury Italy. Though occasionally tedious, still it was a stronger and more substantial work than its original. The Renaissance, in which Boccaccio shared in Italy, can hardly

be said to have found its way to England in the fourteenth century; hence it is the medieval Chaucer who borrows from the renaissance Boccaccio and excels him in his own field.

Aside from the Canterbury Tales, there remain among his important works, The Parliament of Fowls and the Legend of Good Women, both of them filled with reminiscences of the reading of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The first is a semi-political poem in celebration of the wooing of Anne of Bohemia by Richard II of England. The second is written in praise of the faithful love of woman.

The Canterbury Tales. In the fourteenth century it was the habit of the English people, as it still is, upon a holiday to make a pilgrimage, traveling in groups. The most pleasant pilgrimage for those who lived in Middlesex, the county in which Chaucer lived, was to the shrine of Thomas à Becket, at Canterbury. Chaucer must have made one of these pilgrimages in some spring-time earlier than 1388, for it was in that year that the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales seems to have been written. These pilgrimages were much more democratic affairs in those days than they are now. It was the custom to start from some public house or inn, persons of all ranks and walks of life traveling freely but together for safety's sake. Chaucer makes his pilgrims set out from the Tabard Inn of Southwark, a suburb of London, to ride on horseback to Canterbury and home again, and plans to make each of them tell tales. This is the framework of the great poem. The student will find a somewhat similar device employed by Boccaccio before Chaucer, and later by Longfellow in his Tales of a Wayside Inn.

Chaucer had a magnificent eye for color, a superb ear for music, and a penetrative insight into character. The Tales are filled with the love of external nature. The lines sing themselves forever in the memory of any one who reads them. It is

in the Prologue, especially, that he portrays nearly all the types of character of consequence in the England which had become truly English by his time. The characters stand out from the pages as living men and women. "I see all the pilgrims," said Dryden," their humours, their features, and their very dress, as distinctly as if I had supped with them at the Tabard in Southwark." Counting the Host of the Tabard Inn, and the Canon's Yeoman, who joins the company on the road, and the poet himself, there are thirty-two pilgrims, each of whom, according to the plan outlined in the Prologue, is to tell four tales: two tales on the journey to and two on the journey from Canterbury. Only twenty-three Tales, however, are completed, — unless we count the very brief fragment, "The Rhyme of Sir Thopas." The pilgrims include the Knight, the Squire, the Yeoman, the Cook, the Miller, the Lawyer, the Doctor, the Merchant, the Plowman, the Shipman, several ecclesiastical types, and many others. The ecclesiastical characters are nearly all portrayed with much of satire, because of their worldliness and gross materialism, though the town Parson, brother to the Plowman, is delineated with the most loving and reverent touch of all: a man poor in the goods of this world, but rich in holy thought and work. This parson and the scholar or "Clerk" of Oxford and the Plowman are to modern readers the most attractive of all of these figures, though the author of them seemed to think the Wife of Bath the best character he had drawn.

The tale told by the Nun's Priest has charmed more people than any other one of the tales, even though it is the many times told mock-heroic story of Chanticleer and the Fox. The tale which the Wife of Bath relates is little more than a variation of Beauty and the Beast, though somewhat reversed in details.