ut his sympathy reached no less the life of the lowly, the poor widow
in her narrow cottage, and that "trewe swynkere and a good," the
plowman whom Langland had made the hero of his vision. He is, more
than all English poets, the poet of the lusty spring, of "Aprille with
her showres sweet" and the "foules song," of "May with all her floures
and her greene," of the new leaves in the wood, and the meadows new
powdered with the daisy, the mystic Marguerite of his _Legend of Good
Women_. A fresh vernal air blows through all his pages.

In Chaucer's earlier works, such as the translation of the _Romaunt of
the Rose_ (if that be his), the _Boke of the Duchesse_, the _Parlament
of Foules_, the _Hous of Fame_, as well as in the _Legend of Good
Women_, which was later, the inspiration of the French court poetry of
the 13th and 14th centuries is manifest. He retains in them the
mediaeval machinery of allegories and dreams, the elaborate
descriptions of palaces, {36} temples, portraitures, etc., which had
been made fashionable in France by such poems as Guillaume de Lorris's
_Roman de la Rose_, and Jean Machault's _La Fontaine Amoureuse_. In
some of these the influence of Italian poetry is also perceptible.
There are suggestions from Dante, for example, in the _Parlament of
Foules_ and the _Hous of Fame_, and _Troilus and Cresseide_ is a free
handling rather than a translation of Boccaccio's _Filostrato_. In all
of these there are passages of great beauty and force. Had Chaucer
written nothing else, he would still have been remembered as the most
accomplished English poet of his time, but he would not have risen to
the rank which he now occupies, as one of the greatest English poets of
all time. This position he owes to his masterpiece, the _Canterbury
Tales_. Here he abandoned the imitation of foreign models and the
artificial literary fashions of his age, and wrote of real life from
his own ripe knowledge of men and things.

The _Canterbury Tales_ are a collection of stories written at different
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 a 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 tal