ENGLISH LITKHATI'KK. 



HI 



TRANSLATION OP EXTRACT II. IN LAST BEADING. 

 DEMOSTHENES, " DB CORONA," 250261. 



Tom we now to our man of dignity -to him who consider* othi-rs 

 u worthy only of the spittle of bis mouth and beg him to compare 

 his fortunes with mine. (Addreut* himttlf to .f.'cH.n.) Born and 

 i i ! in the veriest poverty, your earliest years found you attached to 

 a mean school of which your father was the preceptor. To prepare 

 the ink, to sponge the benches, and to sweep the schoolroom ; such 

 were your occupations occupations befitting a menial, but unworthy 

 a freedman's son. Arrived at manhood, you became your mother's 

 aid ; as she performed her stock of initiatory rites, you read the 

 mystic formula, and bore a part in all the subsequent operations. At 

 night it was your business to clothe the candidates in skins of fawn, 

 to pour them out huge cups of wine, to wash them with the lustral 

 water, to cleanse their skins with loam and bran ; and, the holy rites 

 thus done, to raise them up and bid them cry 



(Mimics) 



" My bane I have flod, 

 My bliss I have sped : " 



none, as was your boast, giving forth the holy shout with such a 

 potent voice as yourself. (Turn* to the byitandtrt.) Verily I can 

 believe it ! for who that hears those powerful tones of declamation in 

 which he now indulges can for a moment doubt that his religious 

 exclamatious were pre-eminently grand? (To sch\ntt.) The day 

 found you a different employment. You had then to conduct your 

 noble troop through the public streets, their heads crowned with 

 fennel and with poplar leaves, while yourself wore seen now pressing 

 the coppered serpents now elevating them above your head now 

 shouting " Evoi Saboi " now raising a dance to the words " Hyes 

 Attes, Attes Hyes ! "while all the crones and beldamos of the quarter 

 honoured you with the pompous titles of Exarch, chief conductor, 

 chest-carrier, fan-bearergingerbread and cake and twisted bun falling 

 plentifully upon you as the reward of your pious labours. Happy and 

 distinguished lot ! Who can think it were his own, and, so thinking, 

 cot deem himself supremely blest ? Mitchell. 



LESSONS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. V. 



CHAUCEE AND HIS TIMES THE "CANTERBURY TALES." 



WE have reserved to the last the consideration of the " Canter- 

 bury Tales," probably the latest, and certainly by far the 

 greatest of Chaucer's works. 



The general conception of this great work is, in one sense, 

 not altogether original. Writers before Chaucer had done what 

 many have done since, that is, had brought together a number 

 of imaginary personages, more or less naturally grouped, and 

 had placed a series of stories in the mouths of these characters ; 

 by this means giving a sort of continuity to what would other- 

 wise bo a collection of isolated stories, and securing a double 

 interest for the whole work. Boccaccio, shortly before, had 

 adopted this scheme in his " Decameron," in which he intro- 

 duces a number of young ladies and gentlemen who have taken 

 refuge in the same villa to escape the pestilence in Florence ; 

 and it is not improbable that the plan of the " Canterbury 

 Tales " may have been to some extent suggested by the " De- 

 cameron;" though it is more likely still that this method of 

 grouping was so familiar to the writers of Chaucer's day, and 

 therefore suggested itself so naturally to his mind, that it 

 could not be said to have been due to any one example. But, 

 however this may be, it is clear that in the judgment with 

 which Chaucer has selected his group of personages and the 

 mode of bringing them together, the unequalled power with 

 which he has given life to the individuals composing it, and the 

 dramatic force with which he has conducted the action of the 

 poem, this great work is in the highest and best sense original. 



The poet begins by telling us that one night in spring, the 

 season of pilgrimages, he found himself at the hostelry of the 

 Tabard (afterwards the Talbot), in Southwark, ready to start on 

 a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury. 

 He finds there nine-and-twenty or thirty other persons bound 

 upon the same pilgrimage with himself. The company is a 

 most varied one. The first group we are introduced to consists 

 of a knight, a young Bquire, his son, and a yeoman, his servant, 

 going to perform the vow made by the knight, aa we may 

 gather, during his last foreign expedition. A prioress, Madame 

 Eglantine, a very dignified lady, was also there, and in her train 

 an attendant nun and three priests. Then there was a monk, 

 a great man of his class, delighting in the chase and despising 

 the restraints of monastic rule. The mendicant friar, again, 



u in an inferior rank a man of the same type, "a wanton aad 

 merry." Of very different, bat not lea* strongly-marked type* 

 are the sober and prudent merchant, the poor clerk or scholar 

 from Oxford, the serjeant-at-law, and the franklin or country 

 gentleman. Then there are the haberdasher, the carpenter, 

 the webbe or wearer, the dyer, and tapieer or carpet-maker, the 

 cook or keeper of a cook-shop, and the ahipman or sea captain. 

 A doctor of physio i* also of the party, and a wife of Bath * 

 well-to-do cloth manufacturer. In strong contrast with *?> 

 of the preceding characters it the poor parson of a country 

 parish, who U going on pilgrimage accompanied by hi* brother, 

 a ploughman. The list U completed by a miller, a "MMt*ripl or 

 steward of some public institution, a reeve or 'bailiff, a sompner 

 or summoning officer of an ecclesiastical court, and a r-*Hflim 

 or seller of papal indulgences. With this company, and til* 

 good cheer of the Tabard, the evening passe* pleasantly ; aad 

 at its close the host of the inn proposes that he should accom- 

 pany his guests to Canterbury, acting as their guide upon the 

 way ; that to shorten the road each of the company should teh 

 two stories on the journey to Canterbury, and two on the return 

 journey ; that he himself should act as arbiter among them, to 

 whose decisions all ahouli be bound to yield obedience; *^ 

 that the most successful story-teller should be entertained at 

 supper by the whole party on their return to the Tabard. This 

 proposal is at once accepted. The pilgrims start for Canterbury 

 the following morning ; and in accordance with their agreement 

 they tell their tales in the order in which the host calls upon 

 them. And the incidents of the journey and the tales of the 

 travellers form the subject of the poem. 



The special advantages of this plan are evident. No "^tntt 

 could have enabled Chaucer to fill his canvas with a greater 

 variety of characters, taken from all classes of society, and of 

 all shades of opinion and temperament, or to have brought 

 them together in a manner more natural and unstrained. No 

 plan, in short, could have enabled him to give us a more com* 

 plete and living picture of the life of his day. And the same 

 thing enables him, without any appearance of incongruity, to 

 give endless variety to his stories, suiting in each caae the 

 character of the story to the circumstances of the story-teller 

 with admirable judgment. Had this plan been worked out in 

 its entirety, the " Canterbury Tales," which as it is form a 

 long work, would have been one of the longest in the world ; 

 for we should not only have had the story of the journey to 

 Canterbury, and the journey back, with probably the incidents 

 of the stay at Canterbury, and the farewell supper to the teller 

 of the best tale ; but we should also have had more than 120 

 tales. But the work as we have it is manifestly incomplete. 

 We have only twenty-four tales, and even this number is only 

 reached by certain departures from the original plan. Of the 

 pilgrims who started in company, the knight, the miller, the 

 reeve, Hie cook,* the man of law, the wife of Bath, the friar, 

 the sompnour, the clerk of Oxenford, the merchant, the squire, 

 the franklin, the second nun, the doctor of physio, the pardoner, 

 the shipman, the prioress, the monk, the nun's priest, the man- 

 ciple, and the parson tell one tale each. Chaucer himself begins 

 to tell the Tale of Sir Thopas, a dreary rhyming tale, intended 

 aa a burlesque upon the romances of chivalry still common, as 

 we have seen, in Chaucer's time. But he has not gone far 

 when the host indignantly interrupts him, telling him he will 

 have no more of such " drafty specho " and " rhyme doggerel ;" 

 whereupon the poet begins again, and tells in prose the moral 

 tale of Melibaeus and his wife Prudence. One of the existing 

 tales, too, is told by one who is not among the company which 

 started from the Tabard. During the journey the cavalcade is 

 joined by a canon, an alchemist and a moat unscrupulous rogue, 

 and his yeoman or servant. And the yeoman tells a tale, in 

 which he exposes the fraud and folly of his master so effectually, 

 that the canon leaves the company as abruptly as he had joined 

 it. The story, too, of the pilgrimage itself is as incomplete as 

 the number of the tales. All that has come down to us and 

 no doubt all that was written has come down to us is the 

 general prologue, in which the pilgrims are described, the placn 

 for the journey formed, and the start related ; the twenty-four 

 tales already mentioned ; and short prologues or introductions 



The cook's tale is a mew fragment A second cook's tale, printed 

 in almost all editions of Chaucer the "Tale of Gamlya " is ccr- 



tainly not Chaucer's. 



