lay before us in a completed form, that its most salient feature was
intended to lie in the variety of its characters.

Each of these characters is distinctly marked out in itself, while at the
same time it is designed as the type of a class. This very obvious
criticism of course most readily admits of being illustrated by the
"Prologue"--a gallery of genre-portraits which many master-hands have
essayed to reproduce with pen or with pencil. Indeed one lover of Chaucer
sought to do so with both--poor gifted Blake, whose descriptive text of
his picture of the Canterbury Pilgrims Charles Lamb, with the loving
exaggeration in which he was at times fond of indulging, pronounced the
finest criticism on Chaucer's poem he had ever read. But it should be
likewise noticed that the character of each pilgrim is kept up through the
poem, both incidentally in the connecting passages between tale and tale,
and in the manner in which the tales themselves are introduced and told.
The connecting passages are full of dramatic vivacity; in these the
"Host," Master Harry Bailly, acts as a most efficient choragus, but the
other pilgrims are not silent, and in the "Manciple's" Prologue, the
"Cook" enacts a bit of downright farce for the amusement of the company
and of stray inhabitants of "Bob-up-and-down." He is, however,
homoeopathically cured of the effects of his drunkenness, so that the
"Host" feels justified in offering up a thanksgiving to Bacchus for his
powers of conciliation. The "Man of Law's" Prologue is an argument; the
"Wife of Bath's" the ceaseless clatter of an indomitable tongue. The
sturdy "Franklin" corrects himself when deviating into circumlocution:--

Till that the brighte sun had lost his hue,
For th' horizon had reft the sun of light,
(This is as much to say as: it was night).