much unkind criticism, and that perhaps was the The Legende of reason why he had dwelt, at the conclusion Goode Women. of the House of Fame, on the universality of false reports. Like Milton, he had felt the sting of "evil tongues." In the Legende of Goode Women Chaucer at once states the case for the defendant, and makes the amende honorable. In certain of his earlier poems he had assailed the credit of the sex and ridiculed the "great passion." Now, as an act of complaisance to his benefactress, he recants his errors, and sings in moving strains the constancy of true womanhood. Once more he owes the frame, the broad outlines, of his poetry to Boccaccio, who had written in Latin prose a cyclic work About Famous Women. But Chaucer's scholarly attainments enabled him to have recourse to the fountainhead-to more than one fountainhead; and this he seems to have preferred to slavish dependence on what may be termed "classical dictionaries." He consults a late medieval work, the Trojan History of Guido of the Columns, for whom he has discarded his former mentor, Benoît de SainteMore; but apart from this, his sources are Livy, Florus, Virgil's Eneid, Ovid's Fasti and Metamorphoses, and, above all, Ovid's Heroides. A characteristic of the Early Renaissance is the intermingling of Christian and pagan elements; and so, while fetching his material, or most of it, from classical authors, Chaucer squares and fashions it into a legendarium or martyrology.

The most interesting portion of the Legende is, in many respects, the prologue, which bears witness to

an agreeable change in the poet's condition. He no longer wastes tiresome hours in casting up Imayoship. accounts, but spends the whole day, from

sunrise to sunset, amidst the carols of the birds and in the worship of the " emperice and floure of floures all," the daisy. In the evening he hies home, and lays him down to rest in a little arbour, so that he may be abroad betimes to see the flower open, and with this thought he falls asleep. Anon he dreams a dream, wherein the God of Love appears to him, leading by the hand a queen "got up" as a daisy

"And she was clad in real habite grene;
A fret of gold she hadde next her heer,
And upon that a white corowne she beer.

The white corowne above the grene
Made hire lyke a daysie for to sene."

The stage-name of this beauteous lady, in whose honour Chaucer is constrained to indite a hyperbolical ballade, is Alcestis, who, according to Froissart, was turned into a daisy; but "goode Queen Alceste" is but a symbol of another queen, to whom Chaucer is to deliver his book, when finished, "at Eltham, or at Sheene." It is a notable coincidence that Chaucer wrote in all nine legends-a total corresponding to the number of years that Queen Ann survived. His martyrs are Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Hypsipile and Medea, Lucrece, Ariadne, Philomela, Phyllis, and Hypermnestra. He himself speaks of this task as a penance, probably intending the expression playfully;

but the themes, as remote from that realism for which his soul yearned, and precluding the exercise of his gift of humour, were not specially congenial, and at last he seems to have wearied of them. Something of this weariness appears in the perfunctoriness of the concluding tales, which, as compared with the preceding narratives, exhibit an appreciable falling off. Although Dante is cited, the Legende of Goode Women indicates a waning of his influence before the seductions of Ovid and Virgil, whose words Chaucer-not always accurately-translates. But the chief significance of the poem lies in this-that, whilst its contents may be deemed in a certain sense reactionary, its outward form marks another stage in the direction of the Canterbury Tales. The Legende of Goode Women is, in fact, the first example in English of a connected series of short versified tales in decasyllabic couplet. The Seven Sages (to seek no further) is, though much earlier, in octosyllables.

In the House of Fame Chaucer had reverted to the short couplet as more suited than "rhyme royal" for the purpose of narration. During this Metre. excursus he had apparently felt anew the disadvantages of octosyllabic verse,1 and in the Legende of Goode Women he employs a compromise-heroic couplets, of which his successors were destined to make so large a use, but which now appear for the first time in English literature. The earliest application of this metre may perhaps be criticised as

1 Chaucer's, however, are splendid octosyllables, the first really good, and among the best to this day.

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24

inopportune, as out of accord with the tenderness and pathos of the subject; but, whatever we may think of its handselling, the value of the metre, its aptness for humour and characterisation, is at once realised on reaching the Canterbury Tales.

It is fairly certain that the germ of the Canterbury Tales is to be sought in actual experience. We know from the House of Fame that Chaucer had

The Canter-
bury Tales.

gone a-pilgrimaging, and that this transient glimpse of the world had left a deep impression on him. Probably it was at this time that the idea of describing such a journey laid hold of his imagination, though he may have been previously acquainted with the account of the pilgrimage to Saint Truth in the vision of Piers Plowman. A motley company of pilgrims meet at the Tabard in Southwark, and on the proposal of mine host each agrees to tell a story in going to, and returning from, the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury. This programme, so far as the record is concerned, was never carried out. There are twenty-nine pilgrims, and only twenty-four tales, so that, assigning one tale to each pilgrim, five would be required to make up the promised number of stories during the journey to Canterbury. The whole of the remainder of the work-the stay at Canterbury, the tales told during the journey from Canterbury, and the prize - supper which the company was to "stand" the winner- remains a blank. Not only was the plan of the Canterbury Tales never completed, but there are indications that, with the progress of the work, the plan itself underwent modi

fications. For instance, in the general prologue the

host stipulates

"That ech of yow to schorte with your weie,

In this viage, schal telle tales tweye,

To Caunturburi-ward, I mene it so,

And hom-ward he schal tellen other tuo."

In the prologue of the Persones Tale, the host observes, on the contrary

"Now lakketh us no tales moo than oon,"

and adjures the parson

"Ne breke nought oure play,

For every man, save thou, hath told his tale."

Another difficulty respects the number of the pilgrims. In 1. 24 of the general prologue Chaucer states plainly that there came into the Tabard

"Wel nyne and twenty in a companye";

but immediately upon this he proceeds to enumerate, himself included, thirty-one. It has been proposed to surmount this difficulty by rejecting II. 163, 164-the latter, at any rate-as interpolated; but Chaucer's inconsistencies do not end here, and rather than disturb the text on non-textual grounds, it will be better to regard these contradictions as due to vacillation on the part of the writer, who, distracted by the untoward and unlooked-for bulkiness of his task, either forgot or neglected to reconcile those passages in which his change of purpose is betrayed.

The poet's inclusion of himself is significant in two