string of beads. From his vest a black case is suspended, which appears to contain a knife, or possibly a "penner or pen-case. The expression of the countenance is intelligent; but the fire of the eye seems quenched, and evident marks of advanced age appear on the countenance. A deduction from the apparent age must be made to accord with the poet's statement that he was old and unlusty at fifty-two. There are two other miniature portraits in manuscripts at the British Museum, upon one of which (Additional MS. 5141) there is little doubt that the quaint standing panel-portrait in the National Portrait Gallery is based. Some of these oil portraits are of considerable interest, though it is not likely that any of them date back beyond the time of Elizabeth.

In the Occleve portrait we recognise the meditative, downcast, yet slyly observant eyes, the broad brow, the sensuous mouth, the somewhat large yet well-shaped nose, and the general expression of good humour-all features which seem characteristic of the describer of the Canterbury pilgrims. The poet has a small forked beard, such as that ascribed to the Merchant in The Canterbury Tales; the hair is white, and the general appearance that of a man of about sixty. In manner, if we may accept the autobiographical indications of his greatest poem, the poet seemed "elvish, doing to no wight dalliaunce," with the habit of staring on the ground, as if he would find a hair -a practice common with short-sighted people. There are, indeed, frequent hints of the poet's retiring habits, especially in The Prologue to the Rime of Sir Thopas, where Chaucer has put into the mouth of the host a half-bantering description of his personal appearance. We learn from

1 For reproduction of all the best miniatures and portraits, with notes thereon, the curious reader is referred to M. H. Spielmann's interesting little monograph, The Portraits of Geoffrey Chaucer (1900).

other passages in his writings that he worked hard all day at the customs-books, and then, instead of recreation, he came home and applied himself to another book. "Dumb as a stone, studying and reading alway, till his head ached and his look became dazed, so that his neighbours, living at his very door, looked on him as an hermit," though he tells us that he was "really no ascetic" "his abstinence was little."

By the more recent critics of Chaucer his work has been divided into three chronological periods-the French period, the Italian period, and the English period. From the writings of his fellow-countrymen, his predecessors in the use of the mother tongue from Cædmon to Langland, Chaucer derived little or nothing. He disregarded the old English tradition, the exponents of which he probably looked down upon as provincial and churlish. He began his literary career as a translator of French poems and adapter of French forms and ideas. To this period are assigned his translation of the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer's A. B. C. (an imitation, each of the twenty-three stanzas of which begins with a fresh letter of the alphabet), The Complaint to Pity, and The Book of the Duchess.

To the second period of Italian influence, which began about 1372, the date of the first Italian journey, are ascribed the chief of Chaucer's minor poems: The Parliament of Foules (birds) (1381), Troilus and Criseyde (1381-2), The House of Fame (1382), and The Legend of Good Women (1385).

All the poems of Chaucer's first period are, comparatively speaking, those of a prentice hand or student in the art of poetry. A great advance is shown in both technical power and originality in the long narrative poem of Troilus and Criseyde, not more than one-third of which was derived from its ostensible original, the Il Filostrato of Boccaccio; but Chaucer owed much of the remainder

to the Roman de Troye of Benoit and to the Historia Trojana of Guido delle Colonne. The story was based for the most part upon the mediæval Troy story which was subsequently utilised by Shakespeare and by Dryden. But it vivifies the beauty and passion of Criseyde and the humorous side of Sir Pandarus in a manner which was entirely fresh and strange to mediæval fiction. Boccaccio had used the ottava rima in his poem, but Chaucer uses the seven-line stanza with a mastery which indicates a rapid artistic growth about this period (1381-2). Troilus was followed by The House of Fame, a shorter poem of about a thousand octosyllabic couplets, in which more than in any other of his poems Chaucer seems to derive his inspiration from Dante. Next comes The Legend of Good Women, a misty prototype of Tennyson's exquisite Dream and the immediate precursor of The Canterbury Tales. For the details of his sad heroines Chaucer depends on Ovid, while as regards its general plan the poem is based more directly upon Boccaccio's De Claris Mulieribus. The Italian, however, describes 105 women, while Chaucer limits himself to twenty, including Penelope, Helen, Lucretia, Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Laodamia, Canace, Ariadne, Medea, Philomena, and Alcestis. But of several of these the portraiture is barely commenced. The prologue to this poem is a worthy forerunner of the ripest production of Chaucer's pen, and the most famous, surely, of all prologues. Both it and The Legend furnish us with early examples of the great metre, that heroic couplet which was to become such a mainstay of English verse. Of the poems once ascribed to Chaucer, the two most notable and the most pleasing are The Court of Love and The Flower and the Leaf. The former was added to the canon by John Stow in 1561; the latter was first printed as Chaucer's by Speght in 1498. Both these poems have sime affinity with the court-like romances of the early

eighties of Chaucer's career, both are admittedly smooth and pretty, and both alike are relentlessly cut adrift by the critics and grammarians of to-day.

From his French models Chaucer had learnt muchthe most approved allegorical conventions of the school, the art of poetical embroidery by means of the introduction of quaint and learned illustrations, with the knack of graceful and chivalric expression. Above all, he learnt from them the forms of verse. From them he also learned the conventional poetic amble, the concomitant qualities of which were tendencies to incoherence, to garrulity, and to interminable repetition, degenerating at worst into the merest gabble. From the Italians, especially from Dante and Boccaccio, Chaucer learnt lessons of higher value. From Boccaccio, as a real master of narrative, he learnt the secret of construction-how to plan a story and carry it out in due proportion. He derived many stories from him, and he is always at his best when he is put upon his mettle by Boccaccio. From Dante, too, he learnt many details of artistic workmanship. But his main discovery among the Italians was the secret of harmonious composition. He no longer wrote with the licence of a trouvère. He has, now, a keen eye for what is redundant and tautological; he retouches, connects, groups, generalises, composes. In all these directions his powers were approaching maturity at the time of his framing the scheme of The Canterbury Tales.

The idea of the Canterbury pilgrimage as a framework for a series of stories seems to have been Chaucer's own. When we compare it with the devices for linking together stories used by Boccaccio or the editor of The Arabian Nights, we see the inherent superiority of Chaucer's plan. A pilgrimage to Canterbury, occupying about a week during the spring-time, afforded a pleasant holiday to most varied forms of English society. It was a very common

plan for pilgrims to rendezvous at such an inn as the Tabard at Southwark, and to travel in parties on the road for purposes of safety. Chaucer brings his varied company of pilgrims before us with such vigour that, as Dryden said, one can see their humours, their features, and their very dress, as if one had supped with them at the Tabard.

Twenty-nine persons are gathered in all, who, for the space of a four days' journey, have the same object in view, and are going to live a common life. Forty-six miles from London is the shrine, famous all Europe over, which contains the relics of Henry II.'s former adversary—the chancellor Thomas à Becket, assassinated on the steps of the altar in December, 1170, and canonised about three years afterwards. "Mounted each on his steed, either good or bad—the Knight on a beast sturdy though of indifferent appearance, the hunting Monk on a superb palfrey 'as brown as is a berye,' the Wife of Bath sitting astride her horse and showing her red stockings-they set out, taking with them mine host of the Tabard; and there they go at an easy pace, along the sunny road lined with hedges, among the gentle undulations of the soil. They will cross the Medway; then will pass beneath the walls of Rochester's gloomy keep, then one of the principal fortresses of the kingdom, sacked but recently by revolted peasantry; they will see the cathedral church, built a little lower down, and, as it were, in the shade. There are women and bad riders in the group; the Miller has drunk too much, and can hardly sit in the saddle; the way will be long. To make it seem short each one will tell tales, and the troop on its return will honour by a supper the best teller."

It was a capital scheme, most excellently carried out, though not anything near to completion; for, instead of the hundred and twenty tales originally planned, only twenty were completed. One of the attractions of the