His most important contributions as an inventor are, of course, his descriptions of the Canterbury Pilgrims, which are the pure outcome of a keen observation of men and women at first hand. So lifelike are they that in them he has made the England of the fourteenth century live again. But how small a proportion of the bulk of the "Canterbury Tales" is contained in these glimpses of English life and manners. It is but the framework upon which luxuriate vines of fancy transplanted from many another garden, and even in its place resembling, if not borrowed from, Boccaccio. The thoroughly human instincts of the poet assert themselves, however, in the choice of the tales which he puts into the mouths of his pilgrims. He allows a place to the crudities and even the vulgarities of common stories as well as to culture-lore. The magic of the East, the love tales of Italy, the wisdom of philosophers, the common stories of the people, all give up their wealth to his gentle touch. With a keen sense of propriety he, with few exceptions, gives each one of his pilgrims a tale suited in its general tendency to the character of its narrator, and in the critical chatter of the pilgrims about the tales, reflects not only his own tastes, but that of the times, the opinions expressed frequently being most uncomplimentary in their tenor. In fine, the life of reality and the life of books is spread out before Chaucer, and his observation of both is keen and interested; and this it is which makes him much more than the "great translator" that Eustace Les Champs called him, and settles the nature of the "subtle thing" called spirit contributed by the individuality of the poet to his subject-matter. He brings everything within the reach of human sympathy, because his way of putting a story into his own words is sympathetic. He was a combination of the story-teller, the scholar, the poet, and the critic. As a scholar he brings in learned allusions that are entirely extraneous to the action in hand; as the story-teller, he takes delight in the tales that both the poet and the people have told; as the poet, his imagination dresses up a story with a fresh environment, often anachronous, and sometimes he alters the moral tone of the characters. Cressida is an interesting example of this. But instead of the characters suggesting by their own action and speech all the needed moral, Chaucer himself appears ever at hand to analyze and criticise and moralize, though he does it so delightfully that one hesitates to call him didactic. The result of all this is that the external form and the underlying essence of his subject-matter are not completely fused. We often see a sort of guileless working of the machinery of art, yet it is true, no doubt, though perhaps not to the extent insisted on by Morley, that he has something of the Shakespearian quality which enables him to show men as they really are, "wholly