This passage does not prove that Chaucer himself visited Petrarch at Padua, but he is so likely to have sought out the great Italian poet when himself in Italy that we may fairly believe that the two men really met. If they did meet, it could only have been before Petrarch had written of Griselda, for he did not read the Decameron till after his return from Venice, and he went to Venice late in September, 1373, when he had been, and still was, so ill that he had been denied to ordinary visitors. The Clerk's Tale is the story of the patience of Griselda, that last tale in the "Decameron" which Petrarch said none had been able to read without tears, and of which he sent to Boccaccio, with the last letter he ever wrote, his own Latin translation, made in 1373, the year before his own death, and two years before the death of Boccaccio. was entitled "De Obedientia et Fide Uxoria, Mythologia."* Chaucer's poem is very manifestly founded upon this version of Boccaccio's tale, from the "Est ad Italiæ latus occiduum Vesulus," &c.: "There is right at the west side of Itaille Doun at the rote of Vesulus the cold," It to the religious application at the end, and the citation of the general Epistle of St. James. Yet the poetical treatment of the story is so individual, that it all comes afresh out of the mind of Chaucer. The shrewd practical sense that is in all Chaucer's poetry appears very distinctly in his beautiful version of this legend of wifely obedience. Its pathos is heightened by the humanising touches with which he reconciles the most matter-of-fact reader to its questionable aspects. Wifely obedience is good, but the legend jars a little with an English sense of what is right and natural when it represents that a poor girl married to a marquis suffered him, as she believed, to murder first her infant daughter, then her infant son, continuing patient in love to him. It is a small matter after this that she also suffered him to send her back to poverty, and consented to serve, at his bidding, the new wife for whom she believed he had prepared a wedding feast; before she learnt that the new wife was her own long-lost daughter, and the new wife's brother the son whom she believed also to have been murdered, *F. Petrarchæ Opera, quæ extant Omnia; ed. Basil. 1554, pp. 601-7. the whole grief she had borne silently having been but a trial of her wifely obedience extended over many of the best years of her life. Chaucer feels that this is against nature, and at every difficult turn in the story he disarms the realist with a light passage of fence, wins to his own side the host of readers with the common English turn for ridicule of an ideal that conflicts with reason, and so tells the tale that delicacy is even refined, while it can be read without a pish or pshaw by the most hard-headed screw of this our nineteenth century. All poetry of Chaucer's has this character, and it is a home-charm of it which not only escapes the appreciation of most foreign critics, but has aspects that even now and then offend them. In the Clerk's Tale, as he advances in the story of the marquis's "marvellous desire his wife to assay," and is about to tell of the taking of her firstborn, Chaucer writes: "He had assayéd hir ynough bifore, And fond hir ever good, what needith it And putté hir in anguysch and in dreede." Before he tells of the taking of her next child, Chaucer says: "O! needless was sche tempted in assay. Whan that thay fynde a pacient creature." And adds, for further humanising of the story, a suggestion of the dogged persistence of the obstinate man.-What could he more? "But ther ben folk of such condicioun, That true suggestion reconciles us to the next extremity of what the poet rightly entitles "wicked usage," while of Griselda his reflection is : 66 Though clerkés praysé wommen but a lite, There can no man in humblesse him acquyte As wommen can, ne can be half so trewe And when he has told all, and dwelt with an excellent pathos of natural emotion all his own upon the patient mother's piteous and tender kissing of her recovered children-for there is nothing in Boccaccio, and but half a sentence in Petrarch,* answering to those four beautiful stanzas beginning, "Whan sche this herd, aswoné doun she fallith, Sche bothe hir yongé children to hir callith❞— he rounds all, as Petrarch had done, with simple sense, which gives religious meaning to the tale, then closes with a lighter strain of satire which protects Griselda herself from the mocker. Griselda, adds Chaucer, herein repeating Petrarch, is not a pattern to be literally followed: "This story is sayd, nat for that wyvés scholde For it were importáble, though they wolde, As was Grisild; therfore Petrark writeth For sith a womman was so pacient Unto a mortal man, wel more us oughte Receyven all in gre that GOD us sente." He adds Petrarch's quotation of St. James, the opening of whose Epistle gives, in words of Scripture, the spiritual doctrine to which Petrarch, and after him Chaucer, would apply the tale of Griselda's patience. "My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this, that the trial of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work." And again, at the close: “Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord." Having pointed to this moral, the Clerk of Oxford ends cheerily. Nowadays Griselds are hard to find; wherefore, and for love of the Wife of Bath, he will * "Hæc illa audiens penè gaudio exanimis, et pietate amens, jucundissimisque cum lacrymis suorum pignorum in amplexus ruit, fatigatque osculis, pioque gemitu madefacit."-Petrarch, De ob. et fid. Ux ̧ say them a song; and so he ends with a playful snatch of satire that begins : "Grisilde is deed, and eek hir pacience, And bothe at oonés buried in Itayle." The Merchant's Tale, next following, modernised afterwards by Pope, in his "January and May," is another story of the beguilement and betrayal of an old husband by a young wife. This story Tyrwhitt refers to a Latin fable by Adolphe, written about 1315. When we come to the next tale-the Second Nun's-though it has no link, we learn that when it was finished the pilgrims were within five miles of Canterbury. The Second Nun's Tale. This is the poem on the "Life and Passion of St. Cecilia," written in Chaucer's earlier years. Its opening lines say that it was translated as an exercise against idleness, the minister and nurse of vice; and, except the opening invocation to the Virgin, it is a metrical translation from the "Legenda Aurea," a treatise on Church festivals, written at the end of the thirteenth century by Jacobus à Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, which Chaucer had read probably in some version that at first followed the original very closely, and then more nearly resembled the Latin version of Simeon Metaphrastes.* It appears that he did not use the French translation by Jehan de Vignay. Acts of the martyrs were thus written to be read in churches on their feast-days; the acts of the martyrdom of Polycarp, so used, being the oldest record of the kind after the Acts of the Apostles. Connected with this is the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, by the prologue, which says, that after the life of St. Cecilia had been told, they reached Boughton-under-Blean, where they were overtaken, as I have already described, by the yeoman of the alchemist canon. The Yeoman's Tale is of a canon-not his deserted lord, but cleverer than he-who, having borrowed one mark of a priest for three days, and repaid him punctually, proceeded to beguile him by jugglery, fully described in the story, into the belief that he knew how to make silver. The priest paid forty pounds in nobles *Printed in Historie Aloysii Lipomani de Vitis Sanctorum, Louvain, 1571. See on this subject Part II. of " Originals and Analogues of some of Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales,'" published by the Chaucer Society in 1875, giving two earlier English versions and a French version. See also Dr. Eugen Kölbing's paper, "Zu Chaucer's Caecilien-Legende," in Vol. I. of Englische Studien, pp. 215-235. for the secret, got instructions that were valueless, and never saw the canon any more. This kind of fraud was still common as late as the sixteenth century. There remain only two tales, the Manciple's and the Parson's, each without any link to mark its place in the series, though we may, from its character, assume that the Parson's was to close the budget of tales told on the way back to London. It is to be observed that the first design, planning two tales each way from each pilgrim, though it probably would have been reduced in execution, was so far from completion, that what we have is one tale each from twenty-four of the pilgrims. No tales are told by the Knight's Yeoman or the Ploughman, none by the Tapiser, the Dyer, the Carpenter, the Haberdasher, and the Weaver. No pilgrim tells more than one tale; and the Cook-of whom we have a tale begun and abandoned, while another, that of Gamelyn, perhaps was set aside as the material for a tale of his-is represented as having reached Canterbury drunk, without having told any tale at all. In the prologue to the Manciple's Tale we read that at "a litel town Which that iclepéd is Bob-up-an-Down, the Host jested at the drunken Cook who had a tale to tell. The Manciple reproved his drunkenness and excused him his story. The wrathful Cook nodded at the Manciple and fell from his horse. The Manciple, in pledge of peace, gave the helpless Cook a draught of wine from a private gourd of his own. The Cook thanked the Manciple "in such wise as he couthe," and the Manciple's story was then told. Whatever place may have been called Bob-up-andDown, "under the Ble" is under the Blean. Boughtonunder-Ble, where the C non's Yeoman joined the party, is Boughton-under-Blean. Bob-up-and-Down has not yet been |