The stories, too, are dramatically suited to the
narrators. The general prologue is a series of such character-sketches,
the most perfect in English poetry. The portraits of the pilgrims are
illuminated with the soft brilliancy and the minute loving fidelity of
the miniatures in the old missals, and with the same quaint precision in
traits of expression and in costume. The pilgrims are not all such as
one would meet nowadays at an English inn. The presence of a knight, a
squire, a yeoman archer, and especially of so many kinds of
ecclesiastics, a nun, a friar, a monk, a pardoner, and a sompnour or
apparitor, reminds us that the England of that day must have been less
like Protestant England, as we know it, than like the Italy of some
fifty years ago. But however the outward face of society may have
changed, the Canterbury pilgrims remain, in Chaucer's descriptions,
living and universal types of human nature. The _Canterbury Tales_ are
twenty-four in number. There were thirty-two pilgrims, so that if
finished as designed the whole collection would have numbered one
hundred and twenty-eight stories.
Chaucer is the bright consummate flower of the English Middle Age. Like
many another great poet he put the final touch to the various literary
forms that he found in cultivation.
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