Beautiful as are many of his other productions, it is the “Canterbury Tales” which have enshrined Chaucer in the penetralia of England’s Glory Temple; it is to the wit, the pathos, the humanity, the chivalry of those tales that our minds recur when our ear is struck with the venerable name of Chaucer. In 1390 we find the poet receiving the honorable charge of Clerk of the Works at Windsor; and, two years later, a grant from the crown of 20_l._ and a tun of wine annually. Toward the end of the century which his illustrious name had adorned, he appears to have fallen into some distress; for another document is in existence securing to the poet the protection of the crown (probably against importunate creditors;) and in 1399 we find the poet’s name inserted in the lease of a house holden from the Abbot and Chapter of Westminster, and occupying the spot upon which was afterward erected Henry VII.’s chapel, now forming one of the most brilliant ornaments of Westminster Abbey. In this house, as is with great probability conjectured, Chaucer died, on the 25th of October, 1400, and was buried in the Abbey, being the first of that long array of mighty poets whose bones repose with generations of kings, warriors, and statesmen, beneath the “long-drawn aisles.” In reading the works of this poet the qualities which cannot fail to strike us most are—admirable truth, freshness, and _livingness_ of his descriptions of external nature; profound knowledge of human life in the delineation of character; and that all-embracing humanity of heart which makes him, as it makes the reader, sympathise with all God’s creation, taking away from his humor every taste of bitterness and sarcasm. This humor, colored by and springing from universal sympathy, this noblest humanity—we mean humanity in the sense of Terence’s: “homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto”—is the heritage of only the greatest among mankind; and is but an example of that deep truth which Nature herself has taught us, when she placed in the human heart the spring of Laughter fast by the fountain of Tears. We shall now proceed to examine the principal poems of Chaucer, in the hope of presenting to our readers some scale or measure of the gradual development of those powers which appear, at least to us, to have reached their highest apogee or exaltation in the “Canterbury Tales.”