From the number of persons in the company, thirty-two in all, it is evident that Chaucer meditated an immense work of one hundred and twenty-eight tales, which should cover the whole life of England.  Only twenty-four were written; some of these are incomplete, and others are taken from his earlier work to fill out the general plan of the Canterbury Tales.  Incomplete as they are, they cover a wide range, including stories of love and chivalry, of saints and legends, travels, adventures, animal fables, allegory, satires, and the coarse humor of the common people.  Though all but two are written in verse and abound in exquisite poetical touches, they are stories as well as poems, and Chaucer is to be regarded as our first short-story teller as well as our first modern poet.  The work ends with a kindly farewell from the poet to his reader, and so “here taketh the makere of this book his leve.”

PROLOGUE TO THE CANTERBURY TALES.  In the famous “Prologue” the poet makes us acquainted with the various characters of his drama.  Until Chaucer’s day popular literature had been busy chiefly with the gods and heroes of a golden age; it had been essentially romantic, and so had never attempted to study men and women as they are, or to describe them so that the reader recognizes them, not as ideal heroes, but as his own neighbors.  Chaucer not only attempted this new realistic task, but accomplished it so well that his characters were instantly recognized as true to life, and they have since become the permanent possession of our literature.  Beowulf and Roland are ideal heroes, essentially creatures of the imagination; but the merry host of the Tabard Inn, Madame Eglantyne, the fat monk, the parish priest, the kindly plowman, the poor scholar with his “bookes black and red,”—­all seem more like personal acquaintances than characters in a book.  Says Dryden:  “I see all the pilgrims, their humours, their features and their very dress, as distinctly as if I had supped with them at the Tabard in Southwark.”  Chaucer is the first English writer to bring the atmosphere of romantic interest about the men and women and the daily work of one’s own world,—­which is the aim of nearly all modern literature.

The historian of our literature is tempted to linger over this “Prologue” and to quote from it passage after passage to show how keenly and yet kindly our first modern poet observed his fellow-men.  The characters, too, attract one like a good play:  the “verray parfit gentil knight” and his manly son, the modest prioress, model of sweet piety and society manners, the sporting monk and the fat friar, the discreet man of law, the well-fed country squire, the sailor just home from sea, the canny doctor, the lovable parish priest who taught true religion to his flock, but “first he folwed it himselve”; the coarse but good-hearted Wyf of Bath, the thieving miller leading the pilgrims to the music of his bagpipe,—­all these and many others from every walk of English life,