es, and two more on their way back, and {37} 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 thirty years ago. But however the outward face of
society may have changed, the Canterbury pilgrims remain, in Chaucer's
description, living and universal types of human nature. The
_Canterbury Tales_ are twenty-four in number. There were {38}
thirty-two pilgrims, so that if finished as designed the whole
collection would have numbered one hundred and twenty-eight stories.

Chaucer is the bright consummate flower of the English Middle Age.
Like many another great poet, he put the final touch to the various
literary forms that he found in cultivation. Thus his _Knight's Tale_,
based upon Boccaccio's _Teseide_, is the best of English mediaeval
romances. And yet the _Rime of Sir Thopas_, who goes seeking an elf
queen for his mate, and is encountered by the giant Sir Olifaunt,
burlesques these same romances with their impossible adventures and
their tedious rambling descriptions. The tales of the prioress and the
second nun are saints' legends. The _Monk's Tale_ is a set of dry,
moral apologues in the manner of his contemporary, the "moral Gower."
The stories told by the reeve, miller, friar, sompnour, shipman, and
merchant, belong to