watchful manager of his master's estates, and had | The practice of connecting together a multitude of grown so rich that he was able to come to his lord's distinct narrations by some general thread of incident assistance, and "lend him of his owen good." His is very natural and extremely ancient. The Orien horse is described, and even named, and he is de- tals, so passionately fond of tale-telling, have uniscribed as always riding "the hinderest of the versally-and not always very artificially-given route." consistency and connection to their stories by putting them into the mouth of some single narrator: the various histories which compose the Thousand and One Nights are supposed to be successively recounted by the untiring lips of the inexhaustible Princess Scheherezade; but the source from whence Chaucer more immediately adopted his framing was the Decameron of Boccaccio. This work (as it may be necessary to inform our younger readers) consists of a hundred tales divided into decades, each decade occupying one day in the relation. They are narrated by a society of young men and women of rank, who have shut themselves up in a most luxurious and beautiful retreat on the banks of the Arno, in order to escape the infection of the terrible plague then ravaging Florence.

Nothing can surpass the nature and truthfulness with which Chaucer has described the Sompnour. His face is fiery red, as cherubim were painted, and so covered with pimples, spots, and discolorations, that neither mercury, sulphur, borax, nor any purifying ointment, could cleanse his complexion. He is a great lover of onions, leeks, and garlic, and fond of "strong win as red as blood;" and when drunk he would speak nothing but Latin, a few terms of which language he had picked up from the writs and citations it was his profession to serve. He is a great taker of bribes, and will allow any man to set at naught the archdeacon's court in the most flagrant manner" for a quart of wine."

If we compare the plan of Chaucer with that of the Florentine, we shall not hesitate to give the palm of propriety, probability, and good taste to the English poet. A pilgrimage was by no means an expedition of a mournful or solemn kind, and afforded the author the widest field for the selection of character from all classes of society, and an excellent opportu nity for the divers humors and oddities of a company fortuitously assembled. It is impossible, too, not to feel that there is something cruel and shocking in the notion of these young, luxurious Italians of Boccaccio whiling away their days in tales of sensual trickery or sentimental distress, while without the well-guarded walls of their retreat thousands of their kinsmen and fellow-citizens were writhing in despairing agony. Moreover, the similarity of rank and

The last of the pilgrims is the "Pardonere," or seller of indulgences from Rome. He is drawn to the life, singing, to the bass of his friend the Sompnour, the song of "Come hither, love, to me." The Pardoner's hair is "yellow as wax," smooth and thin, lying on his shoulders: he wears no hood, "for jollité;" that is, in order to appear in the fashion. His eyes (as is often found in persons of this complexion-note Chaucer's truth to nature) are wide and staring like those of a hare; his voice is a harsh treble, like that of a goat; and he has no beard. Chaucer then enumerates the various articles of the Pardoner's professional budget; and certainly there never was collected a list of droller relics: he has Our Lady's veil, a morsel of the sail of St. Paul's ship, a glass full of pigges bones," and a pewter cross crammed with other objects of equal sanctity. With the aid of these and the hypocritical unction of his address,age in the personages of Boccaccio produces an insipihe could manage, in one day, to extract from poor and rustic people more money than the Parson (the regular pastor of the parish) could collect in two months. The number of the pilgrims now enumerated will be found by any one who takes the trouble to count them to amount to thirty-one, including Chaucer; and the poet describes them setting out on their journey on the following morning. Before their departure, however, the jolly Host of the Tabarde makes a proposition to the assembled company. He offers to go along with them himself, on condition that they constitute him a kind of master of the revels during their journey; showing how agreeably and profitably they could beguile the tedium of the road with the relation of stories. He then proposes that on their return they should all sup together at his hostelry, and that he among them who shall have been adjudged to have told the best story should be entertained at the expense of the whole society. This proposal is unanimously adopted; and nothing can be finer than the mixture of fun and good sense with which honest Harry Bailey, the host, sways the merry sceptre of his temporary sovereignty.

This then is the framework or scaffolding on which Chaucer has erected his Canterbury Tales.

dity and want of variety: all these careless voluptuaries are repetitions of Dioneo and Fiammetta: and the period of ten days adopted by the Italian has the defect of being purely arbitrary, there being no reason why the narratives might not be continued indefinitely. Chaucer's pilgrimage, on the contrary, is made to Canterbury, and occupies a certain and necessary time; and, on the return of the travelers, the society separates as naturally as it had assembled; after giving the poet the opportunity of introducing two striking and appropriate events-their procession to the shrine of St. Thomas at their arrival in Canterbury, and the prize-supper on their return to London.

Had Chaucer adhered to his original plan, we should have had a tale from each of the party on the journey out, and a second tale from every pilgrim on the way back, making in all sixty-two-or, if the Host also contributed his share, sixty-four. But, alas! the poet has not conducted his pilgrims even to Canterbury; and the tales which he has made them tell only make us the more bitterly lament the nonfulfillment of his original intention.

Before we speak of the narratives themselves, it will be proper to state that our poet continues to

describe the actions, conversation, and deportment of | calculated to strike such a mind as Milton's, so gor his pilgrims: and nothing can be finer than the remarks put into their mouths respecting the merits of the various tales; or more dramatic than the affected bashfulness of some, when called upon to contribute to the amusement of their companions, and the squab bles and satirical jests made by others.

geous, so stately, so heroic, and imbued with all the splendor of Oriental literature; for the scenery and subject of this poem bear evident marks of that Arabian influence which colors so much of the poetry of the Middle Ages, and which probably began to act upon the literature of Western Europe after the Crusades.

In point of deep pathos-pathos carried indeed to an extreme and perhaps hardly natural or justifiable pitch of intensity-we will now cite, among the

mouth of the Clerke of Oxenforde. This is the story
of the Patient Griselda-a model of womanly and
wifely obedience, who comes victoriously out of the
most cruel and repeated ordeals inflicted upon her
conjugal and maternal affections. The beautiful and
angelic figure of the Patient Wife in this heart-rend-
ing story reminds us of one of those seraphic statues of
Virgin Martyrs which stand with clasped hands and up-
lifted, imploring eye, in the carved niches of a Gothic
cathedral-an eternal prayer in sculptured stone-
-Patience on a monument,
Smiling at Grief!

These passages, in which the tales themselves are, as it were, incrusted, are called Prologues to the various narratives which they respectively precede, and they add inexpressibly to the vivacity and move-graver tales of our pilgrims, the story put into the ment of the whole, as in some cases the tales spring, as it were, spontaneously out of the conversations. Of the tales themselves it will be impossible to attempt even a rapid summary: we may mention, as the most remarkable among the serious and pathetic narratives, the Knight's Tale, the subject of which is the beautiful story of Palamon and Arcite, taken from the Teseide of Boccaccio, but it is unknown whether originally invented by the great Italian, or, as is far more probable, imitated by him from some of the innumerable versions of the "noble story" of Theseus current in the Middle Ages. The poem is full of a strange mixture of manners and periods: the chivalric and the heroic ages appear side by side: but such is the splendor of imagination displayed in this immortal work, so rich is it in magnificence, in pathos, in exquisite delineations of character, and artfully contrived turns of fortune, that the reader voluntarily dismisses all his chronology, and allows himself to be carried away with the fresh and sparkling current of chivalric love and knightly adventure. No reader ever began this poem without finishing it, or ever read it once without returning to it a second time. The effect upon the mind is like that of some gorgeous tissue, gold-inwoven, of tapestry, in an old baronial hall; full of tournaments and battles, imprisoned knights, and emblazoned banners, Gothic temples of Mars and Venus, the lists, the dungeon and the lady's bower, garden and fountain, and moonlit groves. Chaucer's peculiar skill in the delineation of character and appearance by a few rapid and masterly strokes is as perceptible here as in the Prologue to the Tales: the procession of the kings to the tournament is as bright and vivid a piece of painting as ever was produced by the "strong braine" of me-ings; the Merchant's Tale, which, like the come diæval Art and in point of grace and simplicity, what can be finer than the single line descriptive of the beauty of Emilie-so suggestive, and therefore so superior to the most elaborate portrait-"Up rose the sun, and up rose Emelie?"

The next poem of a serious character is the Squire's Tale, which indeed so struck the admiration of Milton-himself profoundly penetrated by the spirit of the Romanz poetry that it is by an allusion to the Squire's Tale that he characterizes Chaucer when enumerating the great men of all ages, and when he places him beside Plato, Shakspeare, Eschylus, and his beloved Euripides: he supposes his Cheerful Man as evoking Chaucer

The subject of this tale is, as we mentioned some pages back, invented by Boccaccio, and first seen in 1374, by Petrarch, who was so struck with its beauty that he translated it into Latin, and it is from this translation that Chaucer drew his materials. The English poet indeed appears to have been ignorant of Boccaccio's claim to the authorship, for he makes his "Clerke" say that he had learned it from "Fraunceis Petrarke, the laureat poéte." Petrarch himself bears the strongest testimony to the almost overwhelming pathos of the story, for he relates that he gave it to a Paduan acquaintance of his to read, who fell into a repeated agony of passionate tears. Chaucer's poem is written in the Italian stanza.

Of the comic tales the following will be found the most excellent-The Nun's Priest's Tale, a droll apologue of the Cock and the Fox, in which the very absurdity of some of the accompaniments confers one of the highest qualities which a fable can pos sess, viz. so high a degree of individuality that the reader forgets that the persons of the little drama are animals, and sympathizes with them as human be

stories generally, though very indelicate, is yet replete with the richest and broadest humor; the Reve's Tale, and many shorter stories distributed among the less prominent characters. But the crown and pearl of Chaucer's drollery is the Miller's Tale, in which the delicate and penetrating descrip tion of the various actors in the adventure can only be surpassed by the perfectly natural yet outrage ously ludicrous catastrophe of the intrigue in which they move.

There is certainly nothing, in the vast treasury of ancient or modern humorous writing, at once so real, so droll, and so exquisitely enjoué in the manner of telling. It is true that the subject is not of the most delicate nature; but, though coarse and plain-speaking, Chaucer is never corrupt or vicious: his improThe imagery of the Squire's Tale was certainly well prieties are rather the fruit of the ruder age in which

And call up him who left half told

The story of Cambusean bold.

he lived, and the turbid ebullitions of a rich and active imagination, than the cool, analyzing, studied profligacy-the more dangerous and corrupting because veiled under a false and morbid sentimentalism -which defiles a great portion of the modern literature of too many civilized countries.

of his admirable portrait of the Parson; and, however natural it may have been for the licentious Boccaccio to have done such public penance for his ridicule of the "Frati," and his numberless sensual and immoral scenes, his English follower was "made of sterner stuff." The friend of John of Gaunt, and the disciple of Wickliffe, was not so easily to be worked upon by monastic subtlety as the more superstitious and sensuous Italian.

The language of Chaucer is a strong exemplification of the structure of the English language. The ground of his diction will be ever found to be the pure, vigorous, Anglo-Saxon English of the people, inlaid-if we may so style it-with an immense quantity of Norman-French words. We may compare this diction to some of those exquisite specimens of incrusting left us by the obscure but great artists of the Middle Ages, in which the polish of metal or ivory contrasts so richly with the lustrous ebony.

It is worthy of remark that all the tales are in verse with the exception of two, one of which, singularly enough, is given to Chaucer himself. This requires some explanation. When the poet is first called upon for his story, he bursts out into a long, confused, fantastical tale of chivalry, relating the adventures of a certain errant-knight, Sir Thopas, and his wanderings in search of the Queen of Faërie. This is written in the peculiar versification of the Trouvères (note, that it is the only tale in which he has adopted this measure,) and is full of all the absurdities of those compositions. When in the full swing of declamation, and when we are expecting to be overwhelmed with page after page of this "sleazy stuff," -for the poet goes on gallantly, like Don Quixote, "in the style his books of chivalry had taught him, imitating, as near as he can, their very phrase"-he is suddenly interrupted by honest Harry Bailey, the Host, who plays the part of Moderator or Chorus to Chaucer's pleasant comedy. The Host begs him, with many strong expressions of ridicule and disgust, to give them no more of such "drafty rhyming," and entreats him to let them hear something less worn-ed, in a separate syllable. The accent also is more

out and tiresome. The poet then proposes to entertain the party with "a litel thinge in prose," and relates the allegorical story of Melibous and his wife Patience. It is evident that Chaucer, well aware of the immeasurable superiority of the newlyrevived classical literature over the barbarous and now exhausted invention of the Romanz poets, has chosen this ingenious method of ridiculing the commonplace tales of chivalry; but so exquisitely grave is the irony in this passage, that many critics have taken the "Rime of Sir Thopas" for a serious composition, and have regretted it was left a fragment!

The other prose tale, (we have mentioned Melibæus,) is supposed to be related by the Parson, who is always described as a model of Christian humility, piety, and wisdom; which does not, however, save him from the terrible suspicion of being a Lollard, i. e., a heretical and seditious revolutionist.

The difficulty of reading this great poet is very much exaggerated: a very moderate acquaintance with the French and Italian of the fourteenth century, and the observance of a few simple rules of pronunciation, will enable any educated person to read and to enjoy. In particular it is to be remarked that the final letter e, occurring in so many English words, had not yet become an e mute; and must constantly be pro nounced, as well as the termination of the past tense,

varied in its position than is now common in the language. Read with these precautions, Chaucer will be found as harmonious as he is tender, magnificent, humorous, or sublime.

Until the reader is able and willing to appreciate the innumerable beauties of the Canterbury Tales, it is not to be expected that he can make acquaintance with the graceful though sowewhat pedantic "Court of Love," an allegorical poem, bearing the strongest marks of its Provençal origin; or with the exquisite delicacy and pure chivalry of the "Flower and the Leaf," of which latter poem Campbell speaks as follows, enthusiastically but justly:

"The Flower and the Leaf is an exquisite piece of fairy fancy. With a moral that is just sufficient to apologise for a dream, and yet which sits so lightly on the story as not to abridge its most visionary parts, there is, in the whole scenery and objects of the poem, an air of wonder and sweetness, an easy and surprising transition, that is truly magical."

This composition hardly can be called a "tale, " for it contains neither persons nor events; but it is very curious as a specimen of the sermons of the early Reformers: for a sermon it is, and nothing else -a sermon upon the Seven Deadly Sins, divided and subdivided with all the pedantic regularity of the day. It also gives us a very curious insight into the domestic life, the manners, the costume, and even the cookery of the fourteenth century. Some critics have contended that this sermon was added to the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer at the instigation of his confessors, as a species of penitence for the light and immoral tone of much of his writings, and particu-hill-side; laborious indeed at the first ascent, but larly as a sort of recantation, or amende honorable, for his innumerable attacks on the monks. But this supposition is in direct contradiction with every line

We cannot conclude this brief and imperfect notice of this great poet without strongly recommending all those who desire to know something of the true character of English literature to lose no time in making acquaintance with the admirable productions of "our Father Chaucer," as Gascoigne affectionately calls him; the difficulties of his style have been unreasonably exaggerated, and the labor which surmounts them will be abundantly repaid. "It will conduct you," to use the beautiful words of Milton, “to a

else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospects and melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming."

THE THREE SISTERS.

CHAPTER I.

black, clumsy frames, almost all faced the north, so "GABRIELLE, you should not stay out so late that the cold, dark rooms were never lighted up with

alone."

"It isn't late, sister dear, for a summer's evening. The church clock struck eight just as I turned into the little path across the field."

The first speaker, who was the eldest, raised her head from her work, and, looking at Gabrielle, said;

"For you it is too late. You are not well, Gabrielle. You are quite flushed and tired. Where have you been?"

"Nowhere but in the village," Gabrielle said. She paused a moment, then added, rather hurriedly :

"I was detained by a poor sick woman I went to see. Yon don't know her, Joanna, she has just come here."

"And who is she?" Joanna asked.

"She is a widow woman, not young, and very poor. She spoke to me in the road the other day, and I have seen her once or twice since. She had heard our name in the village, and to-night I promised her that you or Bertha would go and call on her. She has been very unhappy, poor thing. You will go, sister?"

"Certainly. You should have told me before. Go, now, and take off your bonnet. You have walked too quickly home on this hot night."

Another lady entered the room just as Gabrielle | was leaving it, and addressed her almost as the first had done:

sunshine; but looked even more dreary in the summer time, with the empty fireless grates, than on winter days. Yet the house seemed to suit well the tastes of the two elder of the Misses Vaux.

It had stood empty for some years before they took it; for its last occupier had committed suicide in one of the rooms-it was just the house for such a thing to have happened in-and the superstitions horror which the event created in the neighborhood. coupled with the dark and cheerless appearance c the house, were the causes why it remained so long unlet and so much neglected.

About six years ago, the Misses Vaux had come quite strangers to the village; and, in a short time. were settled as tenants of the lonely house. They were young women then-not more than three and four-and-twenty; but already grave, severe, and stern. They dressed always in mourning, and rarely was a smile seen on their cold lips; but they spen: their time almost entirely in performing acts of charity, in visiting the sick, and in making clothes for the poor. For miles round they were known and looked up to with mingled reverence and awe. But theirs was a strange, soulless charity-more like the performance of heavy penance than of acts of love.

There was a mystery about their antecedents. No one knew whence they came, or who they were; they had neither relations nor friends; they lived alone in their gloomy house, and only at long inter

"You are late, Gabrielle. What has kept you out vals-sometimes of many months-did they receive so long?"

"Joanna will tell you," Gabrielle answered. "I have only been finding some work for you, sister," and with a smile she went away.

They were two stern, cold women-Joanna and Bertha Vaux. They lived together-they two and Gabrielle-in a dark old-fashioned house, close to a little village, in one of the southern counties of England. It was a pretty picturesque village, as most English villages are, with little clusters of whitewashed, rose-twined cottages sprinkled through it, and a little rough-stone country church, covered to the very top of the spire so thickly with ivy, that it looked like a green bower. Here and there were scattered a few pleasant houses of the better sort, standing apart in sunny gardens, and scenting the air

around with the smell of their sweet flowers.

But the house in which Joanna and Bertha and Gabrielle lived was always gloomy and dark and cold. It was a square brick house, with damp, unhealthy evergreens planted in front, upon which the sun never shone-summer or winter; the flags which paved the front of the door and the steps of the door, were greened over with cheerless moss; and fungi grew up in the seams of the pavement. The windows, with their thick,

even a single letter. They were two sad, weary women, to whom life seemed to bring no pleasure, but to be only a burden, which it was their stern. duty to bear uncomplainingly for a certain number of years.

Gabrielle-the beautiful, sunny-natured Gabrielle -was not with them when they first came to the village; but three years ago she had joined them, and the three had lived together since. She was then about fifteen;-a bright, joyous, beautiful creature, without a thought of sadness in her, or the faintest shadow of the gloom that rested on her sisters. Even now, although she had lived for three years in the chilling atmosphere that surrounded them, she was still unchanged, almost even as much a

child-as gay, thoughtless, and full of joy, as when she first came. It reminded one of a snowdrop blooming in the winter, forcing itself through the very midst of the surrounding snow, to see how she had grown up with this cold, wintry environment. But the gloomy house looked less gloomy now that Gabrielle lived in it. There was one little roc with a window looking to the south (one that had a sunny aspect,) which she took to be bet own, and there she would sit for many hours, work

three

"How unlike a summer evening it is in this room!" Gabrielle suddenly broke the silence by ex-mentioned amongst us? I have kept silence about claiming almost impatiently. "I wish I could, even for once, see a ray of sunshine in it. I have often wondered how any one could build a house in this situation."