The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still."

In this series of poems Chaucer learned how to rely less and less on
an Italian crutch. He next took his immortal ride to Canterbury on an
English Pegasus.

General Plan of the Canterbury Tales.--People in general have always
been more interested in stories than in any other form of literature.
Chaucer probably did not realize that he had such positive genius for
telling tales in verse that the next five hundred years would fail to
produce his superior in that branch of English literature.

[Illustration: CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL.]

All that Chaucer needed was some framework into which he could fit the
stories that occurred to him, to make them something more than mere
stray tales, which might soon be forgotten. Chaucer's great
contemporary Italian storyteller, Boccaccio, conceived the idea of
representing some of the nobility of Florence as fleeing from the
plague, and telling in their retirement the tales that he used in his
_Decameron_. It is not certain that Chaucer received from the
_Decameron_ his suggestions for the _Canterbury Tales_, although he
was probably in Florence at the same time as Boccaccio.

In 1170 Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered at the
altar. He was considered both a martyr and a saint, and his body was
placed in a splendid mausoleum at the Cathedral. It was said that
miracles were worked at his tomb, that the sick were cured, and that
the worldly affairs of those who knelt at his shrine prospered. It