which nothing can efface from our imagination. Or is there less reality
about the "Knight" in his short cassock and old-fashioned armour and the
"Wife of Bath" in hat and wimple, than--for instance--about Uncle Toby and
the Widow Wadman? Can we not hear "Madame Eglantine" lisping her
"Stratford-atte-Bowe" French as if she were a personage in a comedy by
Congreve or Sheridan? Is not the "Summoner" with his "fire-red cherubim's
face" a worthy companion for Lieutenant Bardolph himself? And have not
the humble "Parson" and his Brother the "Ploughman" that irresistible
pathos which Dickens could find in the simple and the poor? All these
figures, with those of their fellow-pilgrims, are to us living men and
women; and in their midst the poet who created them lives, as he has
painted himself among the company, not less faithfully than Occleve
depicted him from memory after death.

How long Chaucer had been engaged upon the "Canterbury Tales" it is
impossible to decide. No process is more hazardous than that of
distributing a poet's works among the several periods of his life
according to divisions of species--placing his tragedies or serious
stories in one season, his comedies or lighter tales in another, and so
forth. Chaucer no more admits of such treatment than Shakspere, nor
because there happens to be in his case little actual evidence by which to
control or contradict it, are we justified in subjecting him to it. All
we know is that he left his great work a fragment, and that we have no
mention in any of his other poems of more than three of the "Tales"--two,
as already noticed, being mentioned in the Prologue to the Legend of Good
Women, written at a time when they had perhaps not yet assumed the form in
which they are preserved, while to the third (the "Wife of Bath")
reference is made in the "Envoi to Bukton," the date of which is quite
uncertain. At the same time, the labour which was expended upon the
"Canterbury Tales" by their author manifestly obliges us to conclude that