The Canterbury tales and Faerie queene &c., &c., &c., ed. for popular perusal with current illustrations and explanatory notes, by D. Laing Purves.

LIFE OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 15
every stage of the connecting story we bless the happy thought which gives us incessant incident, movement, variety, and unclouded but never monotonous joyousness.
The poet, the evening before he starts on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Thomas
at Canterbury, lies at the Tabard Inn, in Southwark, curious to know in what companionship he is destined to fare forward on the morrow. Chance sends him " nine
and twenty in a company," representing all orders of English society, lay and clerical,
from the Knight and the Abbot down to the Ploughman and the Sompnour. The jolly
Host of the Tabard, after supper, when tongues are loosened and hearts are opened,
declares that " not this year" has he seen such a company at once under his rooftree, and proposes that, when they set out next morning, he should ride with them
and make them sport. All agree, and Harry Bailly unfolds his scheme: each pilgrim, including the poet, shall tell two tales on the road to Canterbury, and two on
the way back to London; and he whom the general voice pronounces to have told
the best tale, shall be treated to a supper at the common cost-and, of course, to
mine Host's profit-when the cavalcade returns from the saint's shrine to the Southwark hostelry. All joyously assent; and early on the morrow, in the gay spring
sunshine, they ride forth, listening to the heroic tale of the brave and gentle Knight,
who has been gracefully chosen by the Host to lead the'spirited competition of
story-telling.
To describe thus the nature of the plan, and to say that when Chaucer conceived,
or at least began to execute it, he was between sixty and seventy years of age, is
to proclaim that The Canterbury Tales could never be more than a fragment.
Thirty pilgrims, each telling two tales on the way out, and two more on the way
back-that makes 120 tales; to say nothing of the prologue, the description of the
journey, the occurences at Canterbury, "and all the remnant of their pilgrimage,"
which Chaucer also undertook. No more than twenty-three of the 120 stories are
told in the work as it comes down to us; that is, only twenty-three of the thirty
pilgrims tell the first of th6 two stories on the road to Canterbury; while of the
stories on the return journey we have not one, and nothing is said about the doings
of the pilgrims at Canterbury-which would, if treated like the scene at the
Tabard, have given us a still livelier "picture of the period." But the plan was too
large; and although the poet had some reserves, in stories which he had already
composed in an independents form, death cut short his labour ere he could even
complete the arrangement and connection of more than a very few of the Tales.
Incomplete as it is, however, the magnum opus of Chaucer was in his own time
received with immense favour;' manuscript copies are numerous even now-no slight
proof of its popularity; and when the invention of printing was introduced into
England by William Caxton, The Canterbury Tales issued from his press in the
year after the first English-printed book, " The Game of the Chesse," had been struck
off. Innumerable editions have since been published; and it may fairly be affirmed,
that few books have been so much in favour with the reading public of every
generation as this book, which the lapse of every generation has been rendering
more unreadable.
Apart from "The Romaunt of the Rose," no really important poetical work of
Chaucer's is omitted from or unrepresented in the present edition. Of "The
Legend of Good Women," the Prologue only is given-but it is the most genuinely
Chaucerian part of the poem. Of " The Court of Love," three-fourths are here
presented; of "The Assembly of Fowls," "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale," "The
Flower and the Leaf," all; of " Chaucer's Dream," one-fourth; of " The House of
Fame," two-thirds; and of the minor poems such a selection as may give an idea of
Chaucer's power in the "occasional" department of verse. Necessarily, no space whatever could be given to Chaucer's prose works-his translation of Boethius' Treatise