arranged with care, down to the circumstances of the bottles being bought,
for safety's sake, in the next street to the apothecary's, and of two out
of three bottles being filled with poison, which is at once a proceeding
natural in itself, and increases the chances against the two rioters when
they are left to choose for themselves. This it is to be a good story-
teller. But of a different order is the change introduced by Chaucer into
his original, where the old hermit--who, of course, is Death himself--is
fleeing from Death. Chaucer's Old Man is SEEKING Death, but seeking him
in vain--like the Wandering Jew of the legend. This it is to be a poet.

Of course it is always necessary to be cautious before asserting any
apparent addition of Chaucer's to be his own invention. Thus, in the
"Merchant's Tale," the very naughty plot of which is anything but
original, it is impossible to say whether such is the case with the
humorous competition of advice between Justinus and Placebo, ("Placebo"
seems to have been a current term to express the character or the ways of
"the too deferential man." "Flatterers be the Devil's chaplains, that
sing aye Placebo."--"Parson's Tale."), or with the fantastic machinery in
which Pluto and Proserpine anticipate the part played by Oberon and
Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." On the other hand, Chaucer is
capable of using goods manifestly borrowed or stolen for a purpose never
intended in their original employment. Puck himself must have guided the
audacious hand which could turn over the leaves of so respected a Father
of the Church as St. Jerome, in order to derive from his treatise "On
Perpetual Virginity" materials for the discourse on matrimony delivered,
with illustrations essentially her own, by the "Wife of Bath."

Two only among these "Tales" are in prose--a vehicle of expression, on the
whole, strange to the polite literature of the pre-Renascence ages--but
not both for the same reason. The first of these "Tales" is told by the