the latter in what he says of Canace falls to the ground. That he had that intention seems to me most evident. If so, the Man of Lawe's prologue, and the Canterbury Tales generally, must be brought down to a date subsequent to 1390, in which year, or in 1389, the Confessio first appeared. 51. The Host pronounces the Serjeant's to be 'a thrifty tale,' and, with many pious jurations, calls upon the Parish Priest. The Priest says, What aileth the man, so synfully to swere?' Whereupon the Host 'smells a Loller (Lollard) in the wind,' and advises the company to stand by, and they will hear a sermon. But the Shipman gravely interposes, and says that there shall be no glosing of the gospel nor preaching here; we all believe in the great God,' says he, and no one shall sow cockle (or tares) amidst our clean corn. Perhaps there is a reference here to Wyclif's short sermons on the Gospels read on Sundays and holidays, which were written at Lutterworth towards the close of his life.1 The Shipman then tells his tale, which is about a French merchant of St. Denis and a monk, named Dan John. This tale, like the Miller's and the Reeve's, belongs to Chaucer's cynical mood. It is followed by that of the Prioress, one strictly in keeping with her character and religious training; it is the story of a little Christian boy killed in some Asiatic town by the cruel Jews, who could not endure to hear the child sing his Alma Redemptoris Mater as he went up and down the street. The versification of this tale, which is in the Chaucerian stanza, is here and there rich and musical in the highest degree. In the last stanza there is a reference to the story of 'yonge Hugh of Lincoln,' said to have met a similar fate but a litel whyle ago;' the particulars are given in the Chronicle of Matthew Paris, under the year 1255. The tale itself is taken from a source similar to that of the legend of Alphonsus of Lincoln, which greatly resembles it; this story, however (printed by the Chaucer Society), dates only from the second half of the fifteenth century. 6 52. The Host now looks upon Chaucer, whom he accosts in his rough gibing way : Thou lokest as thou woldest fynde an hare : For ever upon the ground I se thee stare. A tale of mirthe' is called for, and Chaucer professes a willingness to comply. Adopting an old romance tripping stanza, he begins to tell the company of the knightly adventures of Sir Thopas : 1 See Select English Works of John Wyclif, vol. i. Oxford, 1871. Listeth, Lordes, in good entent, Of mirthe and of solas; Al of a knyght was fair and gent His name was Sir Thopas. Sir Thopas rides forth unarmed, and meets with a giant named Sir Olifaunt, who throws stones at him, but Sir Thopas escapes after challenging the giant to fight next day, when he has his armour on. He returns to his castle, and the process of equipment for the fight begins. The description takes up many stanzas; at last all is ready, and the knight sallies forth again. But the patience of the Host is by this time exhausted. 'No more of this,' he says, 'for goddes dignitie.' Of such trashy rimes he will hear no more. Evidently Chaucer meant to quiz the authors of the 'romances of prys,' such as Horn Child, Guy of Warwick, and others that he mentions, which, though still popular, were ever becoming more divorced from the realities of life. The poet pretends to be vexed, but substitutes for the remainder of Sir Thopas the tale (in prose) of Melibous and his Dame Prudence, the subject of which is the forgiveness of injuries. This is translated from the Livre de Melibée et Prudence of Jean de Meung, which is itself a version, or rather adaptation, of the Liber Consolationis et Consilii written by Albertanus of Brescia in 1246. 53. The Host, after drawing a comparison between the patient Prudence and his own wife much to the advantage of the former, turns to the Monk, observes that they are now close to Rochester, and, after much sarcastic compliment on the subject of the worthy Piers's robust and portly appearance, asks for his tale. The Monk proceeds to tell certain tragedies, of which, he says, he has a hundred in his cell. He explains a tragedy to mean the history of one who, having 'stood in great prosperitee,' falls into misfortune and ends miserably. Perhaps Chaucer had begun to write a large work on this theme, in imitation of the De Casibus illustrium virorum of Boccaccio, and here assigns the seventeen 'tragedies' which he had written to the Monk, as his tale. Or, as Mr. Skeat suggests, the four modern instances-Pedro the Cruel, Pedro of Cyprus, Barnabo Visconti, and Count Ugolino-may have been inserted by an after-thought in the course of a revision of the Tales subsequent to their first publication. The death of Barnabo, which occurred in 1385, is the latest event, the date of which is absolutely certain, mentioned in the work. The sources of the tragedies are the Bible, Boccaccio's work just named, the Roman de la Rose (from which come the stories of Nero and Croesus), and Chaucer's own reading and recollections. For the terrible tale of Ugolino, whom he calls 'erl Hugelin of Pise,' he refers his readers to Dante, 'the grete poete of Itaille.' 54. The Knight now interposes, saying that they have had enough and too much of these dismal narratives; and the Host, after enforcing the same thing in his own way, with his usual bitter boldness of tongue, calls upon the Nun's Priest, addressing him with that proper gradation of dis-respect which befits the social difference between a dignified monk and the chaplain of a nunnery, for the tale that he had promised. The amusing tale that follows is taken from a fable of about forty lines, "Don Coc et Don Werpil," in the poems of Marie of France, which is amplified in the fifth chapter of the old French metrical Roman de Renart, entitled "Se comme Renart prist Chantecler le Coc."'1 6 Pro 55. After the Nonnes Prestes tale there is a break. bably Chaucer, if his life had been prolonged, would have assigned some tale to this place, and linked it properly on to the Wife of Bath's prologue. As things are, we can do no better (see above, § 45) than place the last-named prologue in succession to the tale of the Cock and the Fox. The Wife of Bath, a buxom, fresh-complexioned matron, loud of voice and with bold bright eyes, who has had five husbands at the church-door, and whose gay and costly attire is suggestive of the fact, which she ingenuously confesses, that while she married two of her husbands for love, she married three for money, discourses at great length in praise of matrimony before she commences her tale. The shrewd biting humour and sententious pithiness of much of this prologue make it a typical passage exhibitive of one side of the great poet-his esprit moqueur; but the handling is too broad and realistic to admit of its being examined in detail. She does not spare her own sex : Deceite, wepyng, spynnyng, God hath given To women kindly [ = naturally], while that they may liven. The outward life of a vain worldly woman in the England of the fourteenth century is mirrored in her voluble talk. She ever loved to see and to be seen, she says:— Therfore made I my visitations To vigilies and to processions, To prechings eke, and to these pilgrimages, 1 Dr. Morris. How unlike almost all these entertainments to the diversions of a rich tradesman's wife at the present day! It is curious to meet here with the rough proverb which drew the attention of the world a few years back, when used by a great Prussian statesman of the luckless Parisians : But certeynly I made folk such chere, At the end of the prologue a wrangling arises between the Sompnour and the Frere, in the course of which we are told that the pilgrims had got nearly to Sittingbourne, a town ten miles beyond Rochester. The Wife's tale is illustrative of the axiom that the thing which women most desire is to have their own way. The story is the same as that of Sir Florent, in the first book of Gower's Confessio Amantis; in a later shape we have it in the Marriage of Sir Gawayne, a ballad in Percy's Reliques. It is not likely that Chaucer took it from Gower; but the common source remains as yet undetected. 56. The Friar, after commending the matron's tale, proceeds to tell a story of a Sompnour, who, having entered into a friendly league with a fiend, whereby they bind themselves to pursue misdemeanants and divide the plunder, proves to be more hardhearted than his companion; for the latter is willing to spare a poor swearing carter who has put himself in his power, because, as he said, it was not his entente,' whereas the Sompnour is for showing him no mercy. The origin of the tale is supposed to be some old French fabliau. A Latin story of similar drift has been published by Mr. Wright in the Archæologia, vol. xxxii. 6 57. The Sompnour, boiling over with wrath at the uncivil usage which his profession has received at the Friar's hands, follows with a tale in which a questing friar is brought to confusion; it is impossible to go into particulars. The scene is laid in Holderness, a district of Yorkshire; but, according to M. Sandras, the outlines of the story are to be found in a fabliau by Jacques de Baisieux, the incidents of which take place at Antwerp. The Sompnour ends by saying :— My tale is don, we ben almost at toune that is, at Sittingbourne. 58. The Clerk of Oxenford is now invited to open his lips, which he has kept closed all day; he obeys, and tells the tale of patient Grisilde, which, he says, he learned at Padua from Francis Petrarch. This is usually, and with reason, taken as evidence that Chaucer made the acquaintance of Petrarch when he visited Italy in 1373. It appears also from Petrarch's letters that this particular story was known to him many years before he ever saw the Decameron, in which it figures as the last tale. On the other hand it is difficult to believe that Chaucer had not read the story in the Decameron before he ever saw Petrarch. For we have seen (ante, § 32) that in a poem, probably written in 1364, Chaucer inserted several stanzas translated from the Theseide of Boccaccio. If, then, nine years before his interview with Petrarch, Chaucer knew the Theseide, is it not likely that he also knew the Decameron, which had appeared in 1352 or 1353, and immediately obtained a wide circulation in Italy? Yet, considering the difficulty of multiplying copies of any work before the invention of printing, it would perhaps be easy to exaggerate this probability. At any rate it is now an ascertained fact, that Chaucer, in the Clerk's Tale, follows pretty closely Petrarch's Latin version of the tale in the Decameron, and it may be held as certain that he had a copy of this version before him. He may perhaps have seen the tale previously in the Decameron, and glanced through it without its leaving any impression; coming from the lips of Petrarch himself, it may have seemed to be invested with a peculiar grace. As if tired of his theme, and bored by the invincible patience of his heroine, Chaucer adds an 'Envoy' to the tale, in his sharpest tone of irony and banter, entreating 'noble wives' to beware of falling into that excess of humility which made Grisilde put up with her husband's absurd caprices. The Merchant, whose turn has now come, expresses his lively regret that his own wife was not more of a Grisilde, and then tells the tale of January and May, which was afterwards modernized by Pope. The theme is well worn—an old husband married to, and deceived by, a young wife; the story is found in part, according to Tyrwhitt, in a Latin tale written by one Adolphus early in the fourteenth century. 59. Next comes the beautiful tale of the Squire, concerning Cambuscan, the lord of Tartary, and Canace his daughter. It remains unfinished; but Spenser, who gives to it a sequel of his own invention in the fourth book of the Faerie Queene, evidently believed that Chaucer had written the entire tale, but that the concluding portion had been lost. For in the stanzas following the well-known couplet he says: Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled, On fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled— |