company numbered twenty-seven apparently, and at the suggestion of the Host who promised a supper to the teller of the best tale, they told these stories to beguile the time. The first tale was the Knight's about the love of Palamon and Arcite for Emily the beautiful sister of Duke Theseus of Athens. The Miller, the Reeve and the Cook follow with tales suited to the coarseness of their natures, for which Chaucer, in later life, makes an apology. The Cook's is unfinished, and ends after fifty-eight lines with the words

Of this Cokes tale maked Chaucer na more.

Passing through Deptford and Greenwich they arrived late in the afternoon at Dartford, and put up for the night.

Next day began with the Man of Law's Tale, which is the tale of Constance, the Shipman's Tale (a coarse one) followed, and then the Prioress tells her pretty tale of the little murdered chorister. Chaucer himself follows with the dull tales of Sir Thopas in verse and Melibeas in prose. The Monk comes next and instead of a good hunting story which the Host called for he reels off a string of tragedies till he is stopped as being too depressing and the Prioresses, attendant Priest, or the Nun Preeste, tells his tale of the vanity by which a gallant Cock fell a victim to Reynard the Fox, but eventually escaped, and this brought the Pilgrims to Rochester which was their second halting place.

These two journeys had been of fifteen miles each. Next day they did sixteen, and had only ten to do on the last day.

Many of the Tales are unfinished, or left without the final touches, or, having been in earlier years written for one character are in the Tales put into the mouth of another. Hence The Nun speaks of herself as a Son of Eve and the Shipman's Tale seems to have been meant for the Wife of Bath's second Tale.

The Clerk's Tale was written earlier and had some stanzas added and the Knight's Tale is entirely re-written from two previous stories. It is in rhyming Heroic couplets, and it is probable that all the Tales written in couplets were composed after 1386 when he began to devote himself entirely to The Tales and those in stanzas before.

The Nun Priest's Tale is also written in these Heroic couplets.

Chaucer, like Spenser, did not carry out his whole intention or we should have had 120 Canterbury Tales instead of twenty-four, and he reproached himself towards the end of his life for the grossness of some of the Tales, notably those taken straight from Boccaccio and in his time and country considered not unfit for ears polite. This reproach Spenser never had any need to make to himself, for though he too has his lines which we might wish suppressed, this is simply due to the fact that, though himself the soul of purity, he lived and wrote in the unblushing days of Good Queen Bess.

With respect to metres Chaucer introduced several from Italy, viz. the eight-line stanza with three rhymes arranged in the order ab-ab-bc-bc, the seven-line stanza ab-ab-bcc (e.g. The Man of Lawe's and The Clerke's Tale) and the rhyming

Heroic couplet of ten syllables as in The Legend of Good Women. Both Dryden and Pope made great use of this last metre which is still common in English poetry.

SPENSER
1552-1599

EDMUND SPENSER was born in London 1 in 1552, twelve years before Shakespeare and about a year before the hideous Marian fires began to blaze in his native parish of Smithfield. Edward VI died in 1553, Mary in 1558. Besides Shakespeare, his contemporaries in England were Sir Walter Raleigh, Camden, Hooker, Sir Philip Sidney, Drake, Bacon, Ben Jonson, Robert Devereux Earl of Essex, Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester and Queen Elizabeth, to all of whom he was well known; outside of England Tasso published his Gierusalemme Liberata in 1582. He went from Merchant Taylors School to Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1569. Leaving Cambridge he went for a year at least to the North of England, where he wrote The Shepheardes' Calendar in which under the name of Colin Clout he complains to Hobbinol, i.e. his Cambridge friend, Gabriel Harvey, of his ill success in his wooing of Rosalind, " The Widdowe's daughter of the Glenne." The work is in twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year. It is dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney and was published by Spenser's Cambridge friend, Edward Kirke, in 1579-80. This was at the beginning of the 1 See Prothalamion, lines 128-132.

most splendid period of our literature, "The Elizabethan period," and Spenser being now in London was, through Sidney's introductions, able to mix with the most brilliant intellectual society of the day. Under the name of Tityrus, Spenser refers more than once in The Shepheardes' Calendar to Chaucer as his Great Master, for instance in "June" he says—

The God of Shepheards, Tityrus, is dead,
Who taught me homely, as I can, to make :
He, whilst he lived, was the soveraigne head
Of Shepheards all that bene with love ytake :
Well couth he wayle his woes, and lightly slake
The flames which love within his heart had bredd,
And tell us mery tales to keepe us wake
The while our sheepe about us safely fedde.

And again in "December ".

The gentle Shepheard satte beside a springe,
All in the shadow of a bushye brere,

That Colin hight, who well could pype and singe,
For he of Tityrus his songs did lere:

Chaucer had lived 200 years before, but no great poem had been brought out in England during those two centuries which can compare with Spenser's Faerie Queene. The revival of learning had more to do with the appearance of the poem than The Canterbury Tales had, and to this revival with its classical influence the rise of our Pastoral poetry in imitation of Theocritus and Virgil is certainly due.

"The Shepheardes' Calendar conteyning twelve Æglogues proportionable to the 12 monethes, entitled to the noble and vertuous Gentleman most worthy of all titles both of learning and chevalrie