ith the motley throng of Canterbury pilgrims. The
galleries once more swarmed with idle gazers, in the rich dresses of
Chaucer's time, and the whole cavalcade seemed to pass before me.
There was the stately knight on sober steed, who had ridden in
Christendom and heathenesse, and had "foughten for our faith at
Tramissene;"--and his son, the young squire, a lover, and a lusty
bachelor, with curled locks and gay embroidery; a bold rider, a
dancer, and a writer of verses, singing and fluting all day long, and
"fresh as the month of May;"--and his "knot-headed" yeoman; a bold
forester, in green, with horn, and baudrick, and dagger, a mighty bow
in hand, and a sheaf of peacock arrows shining beneath his belt;--and
the coy, smiling, simple nun, with her gray eyes, her small red mouth,
and fair forehead, her dainty person clad in featly cloak and
"'ypinched wimple," her choral beads about her arm, her golden brooch
with a love motto, and her pretty oath by Saint Eloy;--and the
merchant, solemn in speech and high on horse, with forked beard and
"Flaundrish bever hat;"--and the lusty monk, "full fat and in good
point," with berry brown palfrey, his hood fastened with gold pin.
wrought with a love-knot, his bald head shining like glass, and his
face glistening as though it had been anointed; and the lean, logical,
sententious clerk of Oxenforde, upon his half-starved, scholar-like
horse;--and the bowsing sompnour, with fiery cherub face, all knobbed
with pimples, an eater of garlic and onions, and drinker of "strong
wine, red as blood," that carried a cake for a buckler, and babbled
Latin in his cups; of whose brimstone visage "children were sore
aferd;"--and the buxom wife of Bath, the widow of five husbands, upon
her ambling nag, with her hat broad as a buckler, her red stockings
and sharp spurs;--and the slender, choleric reeve of Norfolk,
bestriding his good gray stot; with close-shaven beard, his hair
cropped round his ears, long, lean, calfless legs, and a rusty blade
by his side;--and the jolly Limitour, with lisping tongue and
twinkling eye, well-beloved franklins and housewives, a great promoter
of marriages among young women, known at the taverns in every town,
and by every "hosteler and gay tapstere." In short, before I was
roused from my reverie by the less poetical but more substantial
apparition of a smoking beef-steak, I had seen the whole cavalcade
issue forth from the hostel-gate, with the brawny, double-jointed,