In the history of English intellectual development between the vague ignorance of the Middle Ages and the new growth of learning in the sixteenth century, stands the great figure of Chaucer. The first English writer possessing dramatic power, he is the first also to unite with the art of story-telling, the delineation and study of human character. In his translation of the "Romaunt of the Rose" he belongs to the Middle Ages,--a period of uncontrolled imagination, of unsubstantial creations, of external appearances copied without reflection. In his "Canterbury Tales" he belongs to the present,--when Reason asserts her authority, gives the stamp of individual reality to the characters of fiction, and studies the man himself behind his outward and visible form. The creations of romantic fiction were unreal beings distinguished by different names, by the different insignia on their shields, and by the degree in which they possessed the special qualities which formed the ideal of mediaeval times. The story of their lives was but a series of adventures, strung together without plan, the overflow of an active but ungoverned imagination. The pilgrims to the shrine of Canterbury are men and women, genuine flesh and blood, as thoroughly individual and distinct as the creations of Shakespeare and of Fielding. They dress, they talk, each one after his own manner and according to his position in life, telling a story appropriate to his disposition and suitable to his experience. The knight, with armor battered in "mortal battailles" with the Infidel, describes the adventures of Palamon and Arcite, a tale of chivalry. The lusty young squire, bearing himself well, "in hope to stonden in his lady grace," tells an Eastern tale of love and romance. The prioress, "all conscience and tendre herte," relates the legend of "litel flew of Lincoln," murdered by the Jews for singing his hymn to the Virgin. The clerk of Oxford, who prefers to wealth and luxury his "twenty bookes clad in blak or reede," contributes the story of the patient Griselda.