Coleridge says that humor took its rise in the Middle Ages, while a present day writer contradictingly asserts that nobody smiled from the second century until the fifteenth. It is true, that as the advent of Christianity put a full stop to all progress in the arts and sciences so it impeded the advance of learning and delayed the development of humor. And yet, though men may not have smiled during the dark ages, they now and then laughed, at a humor that was far from subtle, but which was the foundation of the world’s merriment. The monks and ecclesiastics who formulated the moral precepts for the people found that the lessons were better conveyed by funny stories than by serious ones, and the preachers came to use the hammer of amusement to drive home their good advices. MODERN HUMOR With the readiness of the essayists to ascribe literary paternity, Chaucer is called the Father of English Poetry. Coleridge observes that he is the best representative in English of the Norman-French Trouvères, but even more than by the French, Chaucer was influenced by the great Italians, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, as well as by Ovid and Virgil. Father of Modern Poetry more correctly describes Chaucer, and as he was the first notable English poet who was a layman, so also, was he the first connected with the court. Though his time, the Fourteenth Century, is practically in the Middle Ages, Chaucer is distinctly modern in viewpoint and philosophy. Born in London, he lived his life in the company of the men and women of the circles he knew and loved. Mankind was his study and his theme. The average reader is hampered by the difficulties of the early English diction, and the modern mind is shocked by the freedom of speech then in vogue. But we append such bits of Chaucer’s verse as space allows. * * * * * The story of the Cock and the Fox, in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, is allowed by judges to be the most admirable fable (in the narration) that ever was written. The description of the birds, the delightful gravity with which they are invested with intellectual endowments, are conceived in the highest taste of true poetry and natural humour. _THE COCK AND THE FOX_