the "Clerk of Oxford," the representatives of religion and learning.

As to the "Tales" themselves, Chaucer beyond a doubt meant their style and
tone to be above all things POPULAR. This is one of the causes accounting
for the favour shown to the work,--a favour attested, so far as earlier
times are concerned, by the vast number of manuscripts existing of it.
The "Host" is, so to speak, charged with the constant injunction of this
cardinal principle of popularity as to both theme and style. "Tell us,"
he coolly demands of the most learned and sedate of all his fellow-
travellers,

--some merry thing of adventures;
Your termes, your colours, and your figures,
Keep them in store, till so be ye indite
High style, as when that men to kinges write;
Speak ye so plain at this time, we you pray,
That we may understande that ye say.

And the "Clerk" follows the spirit of the injunction both by omitting, as
impertinent, a proeme in which his original, Petrarch, gives a great deal
of valuable, but not in its connexion interesting, geographical
information, and by adding a facetious moral to what he calls the
"unrestful matter" of his story. Even the "Squire," though, after the
manner of young men, far more than his elders addicted to the grand style,
and accordingly specially praised for his eloquence by the simple
"Franklin," prefers to reduce to its plain meaning the courtly speech of
the Knight of the Brazen Steed. In connexion with what was said above, it
is observable that each of the "Tales" in subject suits its narrator. Not
by chance is the all-but-Quixotic romance of "Palamon and Arcite," taken
by Chaucer from Boccaccio's "Teseide," related by the "Knight"; not by