er in which he intended the "Tales" actually written by him to
stand; and what was the plan of the journey of his pilgrims, as to the
localities of its stages and as to the time occupied by it--whether one
day for the fifty-six miles from London to Canterbury (which is by no
means impossible), or two days (which seems more likely), or four. The
route of the pilgrimage must have been one in parts of which it is
pleasant even now to dally, when the sweet spring flowers are in bloom
which Mr. Boughton has painted for lovers of the poetry of English
landscape.

There are one or two other points which should not be overlooked in
considering the "Canterbury Tales" as a whole. It has sometimes been
assumed as a matter of course that the plan of the work was borrowed
from Boccaccio. If this means that Chaucer owed to the "Decamerone"
the idea of including a number of stories in the framework of a single
narrative, it implies too much. For this notion, a familiar one in the
East, had long been known to Western Europe by the numerous versions of
the terribly ingenious story of the "Seven Wise Masters" (in the
progress of which the unexpected never happens), as well as by similar
collections of the same kind. And the special connexion of this device
with a company of pilgrims might, as has been well remarked, have been
suggested to Chaucer by an English book certainly within his ken, the
"Vision concerning Piers Plowman," where in the "fair field full of
folk" are assembled among others "pilgrims and palmers who went forth
on their way" to St. James of Compostella and to saints at Rome "with
many wise tales"--("and had leave to lie all their life after"). But
even had Chaucer owed the idea of his plan to Boccaccio, he would not
thereby have incurred a heavy debt to the Italian novelist. There is
nothing really dramatic in the schemes of the "Decamerone" or of the
numerous imitations which it called forth, from the French "Heptameron"
and the Neapolitan "Pentamerone" down to the German "Phantasus." It is
unnecessary to come nearer to our own times; for the author of the
"Earthly Paradise" follows Chaucer in endeavouring at least to give a
framework of real action to his collection of poetic tales. There is no
organic connexion between the powerful narrative of the Plague opening
Boccaccio's book, and the stories chiefly of love and its adventures
which follow; all that Boccaccio did was to preface an interesting
series of t