prologue describing the various personages of the party, though not containing the highest poetry of the work as poetry, is the most acute, discriminating, and brilliant picture of men and manners that can be found in our literature. [Illustration: _CHAUCER_ Title-page of the first attempt to collect his works into one volume. The imprint reads: Imprinted at London by Thomas Godfray, The yeare of our lorde M.D.XXXII. Title: The Workes of Geffray Chaucer newly printed, with dyuers workes whiche were neuer in print before: As in the table more playnly dothe appere. Cum priuilegio. The Workes of Geoffrey Chaucer] Such was the plan of the work. It was laid out on an extensive scale, perhaps on too extensive a scale ever to have been completed. Certain it is that it was very far from ever reaching even remotely that result. According to the scheme set forth in the prologue, the work when finished should have included over one hundred and twenty tales. It actually comprises but twenty-four. Even of these, two are incomplete: the Cook's Tale, which is little more than begun, and the romantic Eastern tale of the Squire, which, in Milton's words, is "left half told." To those that are finished, the connecting links have not been supplied in many cases. Accordingly the work exists not as a perfect whole, but in eight or nine fragmentary parts, each complete in itself, but lacking a close connection with the others, though all are bound together by the unity of a common central interest. The value of what has been done makes doubly keen the regret that so much has been left undone. Politics, religion, literature, manners, are all touched upon in this wide-embracing view, which still never misses what is really essential; and added to this is a skill of portrayal by which the actors, whether narrating the tales themselves, or themselves forming the heroes of the narration, fairly live and breathe before our eyes. Had the work been completed on the scale upon which it was begun, we should have had a picture of life and opinion in the fourteenth century more vivid and exact than has been drawn of any century before or since.