, charged with the constant
injunction of this cardinal principle of popularity as to both theme
and style. "Tell us," he coolly demands of the most learned and sedate
of all his fellow-travellers,

--some merry thing of adventures;
Your termes, your colours, and your figures,
Keep them in store, till so be ye indite
High style, as when that men to kinges write;
Speak ye so plain at this time, we you pray,
That we may understande that ye say.

And the "Clerk" follows the spirit of the injunction both by omitting,
as impertinent, a proeme in which his original, Petrarch, gives a great
deal of valuable, but not in its connexion interesting, geographical
information, and by adding a facetious moral to what he calls the
"unrestful matter" of his story. Even the "Squire," though, after the
manner of young men, far more than his elders addicted to the grand
style, and accordingly specially praised for his eloquence by the
simple "Franklin," prefers to reduce to its plain meaning the courtly
speech of the Knight of the Brazen Steed. In connexion with what was
said above, it is observable that each of the "Tales" in subject suits
its narrator. Not by chance is the all-but-Quixotic romance of
"Palamon and Arcite," taken by Chaucer from Boccaccio's "Teseide,"
related by the "Knight"; not by chance does the "Clerk," following
Petrarch's Latin version of a story related by the same author, tell
the even more improbable, but, in the plainness of its moral,
infinitely more fructuous tale of patient Griseldis. How well the
"Second Nun" is fitted with a legend which carries us back a few
centuries into the atmosphere of Hrosvitha's comedies, and suggests
with the utmost verisimilitude the nature of a Nun's lucubrations on
the subject of marriage. It is impossible to go through the whole list
of the "Tales"; but all may be truly said to be in keeping with the
characters and manners (often equally indifferent) of their
tellers--down to that of the "Nun's Priest," which, brimful of humour
as it is, has just the mild naughtiness about it which comes so drolly
from a spiritual director in his worldlier hour.

Not a single one of these "Tales" can with any show of reason be
ascribed to Chaucer's own invention. French literature--chiefly though
not solely that of fabliaux--doubtless supplied the larger share of his
materials; but that here also his debts to Italian literature, and to
Boccaccio in particular, are consid