Canterbury Tales and Other Poems | Page 4

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Edited for Popular Perusal
b y
D. Laing Purves




CONTENTS

PREFACE
LIFE OF CHAUCER
THE CANTERBURY TALES
The General Prologue
The Knight's Tale
The Miller's tale
The Reeve's Tale
The
Cook's Tale
The Man of Law's Tale
The Wife of Bath's Tale
The Friar's Tale
The
Sompnour's Tale
The Clerk's Tale
The Merchant's Tale
The Squire's Tale
The
Franklin's Tale
The Doctor's Tale
The Pardoner's Tale
The Shipman's Tale
The
Prioress's Tale
Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas
Chaucer's Tale of Meliboeus
The
Monk's Tale
The Nun's Priest's Tale
The Second Nun's Tale
The Canon's Yeoman's
Tale
The Manciple's Tale
The Parson's Tale
Preces de Chauceres
THE COURT
OF LOVE <1>
THE CUCKOO AND THE NIGHTINGALE <1>
THE ASSEMBLY
OF FOWLS
THE FLOWER AND THE LEAF <1>
THE HOUSE OF FAME

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
CHAUCER'S DREAM <1>
THE PROLOGUE TO
THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN
CHAUCER'S A.B.C.
MISCELLANEOUS
POEMS
Transcriber's Note.
0. Modern scholars believe that Chaucer was not the author of these poems.
PREFACE.
THE object of this volume is to place before the general reader our two early poetic
masterpieces -- The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queen; to do so in a way that will
render their
"popular perusal" easy in a time of little leisure and unbounded temptations
to intellectual languor; and, on the same conditions, to present a liberal and fairly
representative selection from the less important and familiar poems of Chaucer and
Spenser.
There is, it may be said at the outset, peculiar advantage and propriety in
placing the two poets side by side in the manner now attempted for the first time.
Although two centuries divide them, yet Spenser is the direct and really the immediate

successor to the poetical inheritance of Chaucer. Those two hundred years, eventful as
they were, produced no poet at all worthy to take up the mantle that fell from Chaucer's
shoulders; and Spenser does not need his affected archaisms, nor his
frequent and
reverent appeals to "Dan Geffrey," to vindicate for himself a place very close to his great
predecessor in the literary history of England. If Chaucer is the "Well of English

undefiled," Spenser is the broad and stately river that yet holds the tenure of its very life
from the fountain far away in other and ruder scenes.
The Canterbury Tales, so far as they are in verse, have been printed without any
abridgement or designed change in the
sense. But the two Tales in prose -- Chaucer's
Tale of
Meliboeus, and the Parson's long Sermon on Penitence -- have been contracted,
so as to exclude thirty pages of unattractive prose, and to admit the same amount of
interesting and
characteristic poetry. The gaps thus made in the prose Tales, however,
are supplied by careful outlines of the omitted matter, so that the reader need be at no loss
to comprehend the whole scope and sequence of the original. With The Faerie Queen a
bolder course has been pursued. The great obstacle to the
popularity of Spencer's

splendid work has lain less in its
language than in its length. If we add together the
three great poems of antiquity -- the twenty-four books of the Iliad, the twenty-four books
of the Odyssey, and the twelve books of the Aeneid -- we get at the dimensions of only
one-half of The
Faerie Queen. The six books, and the fragment of a seventh, which
alone exist of the author's contemplated twelve, number about 35,000 verses; the sixty
books of Homer and Virgil
number no more than 37,000. The mere bulk of the poem,
then, has opposed a formidable barrier to its popularity; to say
nothing of the distracting
effect produced by the numberless episodes, the tedious narrations, and the constant
repetitions, which have largely swelled that bulk. In this volume the poem is compressed
into two-thirds of its original space, through the expedient of representing the less
interesting and more
mechanical passages by a condensed prose outline, in which it has
been sought as far as possible to preserve the very words of the poet. While deprecating a
too critical judgement on the bare and constrained precis standing in such trying

juxtaposition, it is hoped that the labour bestowed in saving the reader the trouble of
wading through