flowers are in bloom which Mr. Boughton has painted for lovers of the
poetry of English landscape.

There are one or two other points which should not be overlooked in
considering the "Canterbury Tales" as a whole. It has sometimes been
assumed as a matter of course that the plan of the work was borrowed from
Boccaccio. If this means that Chaucer owed to the "Decamerone" the idea
of including a number of stories in the framework of a single narrative,
it implies too much. For this notion, a familiar one in the East, had
long been known to Western Europe by the numerous versions of the terribly
ingenious story of the "Seven Wise Masters" (in the progress of which the
unexpected never happens), as well as by similar collections of the same
kind. And the special connexion of this device with a company of pilgrims
might, as has been well remarked, have been suggested to Chaucer by an
English book certainly within his ken, the "Vision concerning Piers
Plowman," where in the "fair field full of folk" are assembled among
others "pilgrims and palmers who went forth on their way" to St. James of
Compostella and to saints at Rome "with many wise tales"--("and had leave
to lie all their life after"). But even had Chaucer owed the idea of his
plan to Boccaccio, he would not thereby have incurred a heavy debt to the
Italian novelist. There is nothing really dramatic in the schemes of the
"Decamerone" or of the numerous imitations which it called forth, from the
French "Heptameron" and the Neapolitan "Pentamerone" down to the German
"Phantasus." It is unnecessary to come nearer to our own times; for the
author of the "Earthly Paradise" follows Chaucer in endeavouring at least
to give a framework of real action to his collection of poetic tales.
There is no organic connexion between the powerful narrative of the Plague
opening Boccaccio's book, and the stories chiefly of love and its
adventures which follow; all that Boccaccio did was to preface an
interesting series of tales by a more interesting chapter of history, and