Ye be my life! ye be mine heartës steer!
Queen of comfort and goodë company!
Beth heavy again or ellës mote I die."

We must know this hobby of his to understand the full comic force of his comparing Alison to a newly-forged noble, bright from the mint: and it seems to me that his pretence of eight years' unrest and sleeplessness, in the 'Book of the Duchess' (see p. 9), is the same humour cropping up in another form.

The freedom of his humour, as one would expect, was progressive. There are unequivocal touches of humour both in "Chaucer's Dream" and in the "Court of Love; witness the sly treatment of Morpheus, and the poet's timid entry into the sacred court; but the humour, as became the subjects, is lurking and subordinate. It is worth noting, that in the "Court of Love," though he could not profess entire ignorance of the passion as he did so often afterwards, he professes to have kept out of the service of Venus for a most unconscionable length of time; he was actually eighteen before he went to her Court, and then he had to be summoned. But the humour is much less overt in the "Court of Love" than in the more mature "House of Fame." In that poem, as in the Canterbury Tales,' he treats his own personality with reckless contempt. When the poet is caught up, at first he loses consciousness; but by-and-by the eagle wakes him up with comical remonstrances at his timidity. Half reassured, he begins to

wonder vaguely what all this can mean :—

"O God, thought I, that madest kind,
Shall I none other wayes die?
Whe'r Joves will me stellify,
Or what thing may this signify?
I neither am Enoch, ne Eli,
Ne Romulus, ne Ganymede,
That was y-bore up, as men read,
To heaven with Dan Jupiter,
And made the goddes botteler !
Lo, this was then my fantasy!

But he that bare me gan espy,
That I so thought, and saidë this-
'Thou deemest of thyself amiss;
For Joves is not thereabout,
I dare will put thee out of doubt,
To make of thee as yet a star."

The comparison between his own stout person and Ganymede, and the implied conception of himself as the butler1 of the gods, are delicious. But, indeed, the passage throughout is so rich, that it is difficult to say which is its most comical touch.

The outcome of his broad humour is seen in the general plan of the Canterbury Tales' as much as in some of the pronounced particulars. With the rougher sort of the pilgrims, and as we shall presently see, only with them, the pilgrimage is a tipsy revel, a hilarious holiday "outing." They are the merriest company that mine "Host of the Tabard" has had under his roof for many a day; and they are such jolly noisy good fellows that, at supper overnight, the host is tempted to propose that he should go with them and direct their merriment on the way. In the energy of his good-fellowship and confident sudden prospect of a hilarious journey, he cries for immediate decision on his plan

"Now by my father's soulë that is dead,
But ye be merry, smiteth off mine head.
Hold up your hands withouten more speech."

They agree; and the idea thus conceived is carried out with no less spirit. The pilgrims must have made a sensation as they rode out of town. The more respectable members of the company doubtless bore themselves with becoming gravity, but the wilder spirits put no restraint upon their mirth. The Miller brought them out of town to the music of his bagpipes-and a bagpipe in the hands of a drunk man is an instrument likely to attract some

1 This, however, is one of those cases where Time has lent an additional touch to the humour. The butler was a higher functionary than we should understand now by the name.

attention. The harum-scarum pimple-faced bacchanalian Summoner had put on his head a garland large enough for an alehouse sign, and flourished a cake as a buckler. His friend and compeer the Pardoner had, "for jollity," trussed up his hood in his wallet, and let his yellow flaxen hair hang in disorder on his shoulders, saying that it was the new

fashion.

"Full loud he sang 'Come hither, love, to me.'
This Summoner bare to him a stiff burdoun,
Was never trump of half so great a soun."

A company with spirits so uproarious in it tasked all the
Host's powers of maintaining order, authoritative though
he was.
Of course they broke through. The Knight, who
drew the lot for telling the first tale, was allowed to finish
it; but as soon as he had done, the drunk Miller struck in
and insisted on telling a noble tale that he knew. Though
hardly able to keep his seat, he was not so drunk as not to
know that he was drunk; he knew that, he said, "by his
soun," and he besought them, if he said anything out of
place, to lay the blame on the ale of Southwark. His tale
does ample justice to his inspiration. The Host having
once let the reins out of his hands was not able to resume
them the president of such a company must keep his
authority by giving his subjects liberty to take their own
way. The butt of the Miller's Tale was a carpenter; and
the Reeve being a carpenter thought himself aggrieved, and
wanted to return the compliment by telling an equally coarse
tale about the cuckolding of a miller. The Host, with the
true instinct of a ruler, at once humoured him, and asserted
his own dignity by cutting short his prologue, and com-
manding him to tell his tale. Then the gross Cook, chuck-
ling over the discomfiture of the Miller, wanted to tell "a
little jape that fell in our city," and the judicious Host
granted permission. There was more intoxicated per-
sonality, wrangling, and peacemaking, as they went on.
The Friar enraged the Summoner by relating an awkward
adventure that happened to one of his profession; and the

D

Summoner gave a merciless Roland for his Oliver. After a long draught of ale, the Pardoner recklessly exposed all the tricks of his trade, and had the audacious assurance, after this full confession of his roguery, to try to work upon the feelings of his brother pilgrims, and extract money from them. It is to be feared, too, that the Host required a little too much of the "corny ale" to drown his pity for poor Virginia: one cannot otherwise account for his getting into a hot quarrel with the Pardoner, which required the intervention of the Knight to smooth it over. Towards the close of the pilgrimage the Cook showed symptoms of being overcome with sleep and ale, and seemed to be in danger of falling from his horse. The Host rebuked him, and the Manciple fell out upon him with such a torrent of abuse, that poor Robin overbalanced himself and tumbled to the ground in a furious futile effort to articulate a reply, and there was much shoving to and fro before they could set him in the saddle again. A pretty pilgrimage to the shrine of a saint! There is endless food for deep animal laughter in the humours of these riotous pilgrims-particularly that madcap pair of ecclesiastics-the Summoner and the Pardoner. One is constantly finding fresh points of comical view in that precious couple. It is a mistake, I may remark, to look in the Canterbury Tales' for satire. If there is any it is there by failure and imperfection; it is a flaw in the poet's design, which was to provide material for disinterested laughter, zealous and profound. To suppose that there is any satire in the candid revelation of the Pardoner's gross deceptions of the credulous vulgar, is to fail to rise to the height of the humour of that great character. There is no more ill-nature in the elaboration of his reckless freaks, than in the often-quoted and justly-praised delicate irony of the opening of the Wife of Bath's Tale.1

1 If M. Sandras had understood English humour, which seems to baffle Frenchmen as Scotch "wut" baffles Englishmen, he would hardly have said that in the 'Canterbury Tales' Chaucer's natural affinity with the spirit of Jean de Meun is made conspicuous. In the following section I shall show how Chaucer maintains his agreement with the spirit of chivalry.

As regards any lurking satirical purpose in the 'Canterbury Tales,' if we suppose that we discern any such purpose, we may take for granted that we are still on the outside of their riotous humour. It is true that a good many of the pilgrims are men of somewhat damaged reputation, or, at least, doubtful virtue. The Merchant is not beyond suspicion; the Miller steals corn; the Reeve has secured a comfortable feathering for his own nest; the Cook is a profligate sot; all the ecclesiastics, Monk, Friar, and Pardoner, exhibit a wide difference between their practice and their doctrine; and even the respectable professional men, the Lawyer and the Doctor, have a questionable liking for large fees. But these failings are not dwelt upon from the point of view of the satirist. With all their sinful taints, the pilgrims are represented as being on the whole jovial companions, satisfied with themselves and with each other; the taints, indeed, are not shown in the aspect of sins, but rather in the aspect of ludicrous peccadilloes or foibles. The sinners are elevated by the hilarity of the occasion above the sense of sin; and the poet does not hold them up to scorn or contempt, but enters genially into the spirit of their holiday revel. He does not join them to backbite and draw out their weaknesses for the bitter amusement or sharp dislike of his readers: he joins them to enjoy their company. Chaucer's humour in the Canterbury Tales' is not in the spirit of Jean de Meun; it comes much nearer the spirit of Burns in the "Jolly Beggars."

IV. HIS DELINEATION OF CHARACTER.

It is somewhat startling to put together, as I have done in the preceding section, the buffoonery that went on throughout the Canterbury pilgrimage. We remember the tales of high chivalrous sentiment and exquisite pathos, and we ask how these were compatible with such noisy ribaldry. The explanation is, that the tales are suited to the characters and manners of the different pilgrims; and that while one set of them indulge largely in ale and inebriated freaks and