of papal indulgences (one hundred and fifty years before Luther)—­an essentially English company of many social grades, bound to the most popular shrine, that of a Saxon archbishop, himself the son of a London citizen, murdered two hundred years before with the connivance of an English king.  No one can read this list without thinking that if Chaucer be true and accurate in his descriptions of these persons, and make them talk as they did talk, his delineations are of inestimable value historically.  He has been faithfully true.  Like all great masters of the epic art, he doubtless drew them from the life; each, given in the outlines of the prologue, is a speaking portrait:  even the horses they ride are as true to nature as those in the pictures of Rosa Bonheur.

And besides these historic delineations which mark the age and country, notwithstanding the loss of local and personal satire with which, to the reader of his day, the poem must have sparkled, and which time has destroyed for us, the features of our common humanity are so well portrayed, that to the latest generations will be there displayed the “forth-showing instances” of the Idola Tribus of Bacon, the besetting sins, frailties, and oddities of the human race.

SATIRE.—­His touches of satire and irony are as light as the hits of an accomplished master of the small-sword; mere hits, but significant of deep thrusts, at the scandals, abuses, and oppressions of the age.  Like Dickens, he employed his fiction in the way of reform, and helped to effect it.

Let us illustrate.  While sitting at the table, Chaucer makes his sketches for the Prologue.  A few of these will serve here as specimens of his powers.  Take the Doctour of Physike who

    Knew the cause of every maladie,
    Were it of cold or hote or wet or drie;

who also knew

      ... the old Esculapius,
    And Dioscorides and eke Rufus,
    Old Hippocras, Rasis, and Avicen,

and many other classic authorities in medicine.

    Of his diete mesurable was he,
    And it was of no superfluite;

nor was it a gross slander to say of the many,

    His studie was but litel on the Bible.

It was a suggestive satire which led him to hint that he was

          ... but esy of dispense;
    He kepte that he wan in pestilence;
    For gold in physike is a cordial;
    Therefore he loved gold in special.

Chaucer deals tenderly with the lawyers; yet, granting his sergeant of the law discretion and wisdom, a knowledge of cases even “from the time of King Will,” and fees and perquisites quite proportional, he adds,

    Nowher so besy a man as he ther n’ as,
    And yet he seemed besier than he was.

HIS PRESENTATIONS OF WOMAN.—­Woman seems to find hard judgment in this work.  Madame Eglantine, the prioress, with her nasal chanting, her English-French, “of Stratford-atte-Bow,” her legion of smalle houndes, and her affected manner, is not a flattering type of woman’s character, and yet no doubt she is a faithful portrait of many a prioress of that day.