times, but put together, probably, toward the close of his life. The
frame-work into which they are fitted is one of the happiest ever
devised. A number of pilgrims who are going on horseback to the shrine
of St. Thomas à Becket, at Canterbury, meet at the Tabard Inn, in
Southwark, a suburb of London. The jolly host of the Tabard, Harry
Bailey, proposes that on their way to Canterbury, each of the company
shall tell two tales, and two more on their way back, and that the one
who tells the best shall have a supper at the cost of the rest when they
return to the inn. He himself accompanies them as judge and "reporter."
In the setting of the stories there is thus a constant feeling of
movement and the air of all outdoors. The little "head-links" and
"end-links" which bind them together give incidents of the journey and
glimpses of the talk of the pilgrims, sometimes amounting, as in the
prologue of the _Wife of Bath_, to full and almost dramatic
character-sketches. The stories, too, are dramatically suited to the
narrators. The general prologue is a series of such character-sketches,
the most perfect in English poetry. The portraits of the pilgrims are
illuminated with the soft brilliancy and the minute loving fidelity of
the miniatures in the old missals, and with the same quaint precision in
traits of expression and in costume. The pilgrims are not all such as
one would meet nowadays at an English inn. The presence of a knight, a
squire, a yeoman archer, and especially of so many kinds of
ecclesiastics, a nun, a friar, a monk, a pardoner, and a sompnour or
apparitor, reminds us that the England of that day must have been less
like Protestant England, as we know it, than like the Italy of some
fifty years ago. But however the outward face of society may have
changed, the Canterbury pilgrims remain, in Chaucer's descriptions,
living and universal types of human nature. The _Canterbury Tales_ are
twenty-four in number. There were thirty-two pilgrims, so that if
finished as designed the whole collection would have numbered one