The selections given are partly of extracts and partly of complete pieces. To the former class belong the lines taken from the opening of the 'Canterbury Tales,' with the description of a few of the characters; the description of the temples of Mars, of Venus, and of Diana in the Knight's Tale; and the account of the disappearance of the fairies at the opening of the Wife of Bath's Tale. The complete pieces are the tales of the Pardoner, and of the Nun's Priest. From the first, however, has been dropped the discourse on drunkenness, profanity, and gambling, which, though in keeping with the character of the narrator, has no connection with the development of the story. The second, the tale of the Nun's Priest, was modernized by Dryden under the title of the 'Cock and the Fox.' All of these are in heroic verse. The final selection is the ballade now usually entitled 'Truth.' In it the peculiar ballade construction can be studied--that is, the formation in three stanzas, either with or without an envoy; the same rhymes running through the three stanzas; and the final line of each stanza precisely the same. One of Chaucer's religious poems--the so-called 'A B C'--can be found under Deguileville, from whose 'Pelerinage la de Vie Humaine' it is translated. Chaucer's style, like that of all great early writers, is marked by perfect simplicity, and his language is therefore comparatively easy to understand. In the extracts here given the spelling has been modernized, save occasionally at the end of the line, when the rhyme has required the retention of an earlier form. The words themselves and grammatical forms have of course undergone no change. There are two marks used to indicate the pronunciation: first, the acute accent to indicate that a heavier stress than ordinary is to be placed on the syllable over which it stands; and secondly, the grave accent to indicate that the letter or syllable over which it appears, though silent in modern pronunciation, was then sounded. Thus _landes_, _groves_, _friendes_, _knaves_, would have the final syllable sounded; and in a similar way _time_, _Rome_, and others ending in _e_, when the next word begins with a vowel or _h_ mute. The acute accent can be exemplified in words like _courage_, _reason_, _honour_, _translated_, where the accent would show that the final syllable would either receive the main stress or a heavier stress than is now given it. Again, a word like _cre-a-ture_ consists, in the pronunciation here given, of three syllables and not of two, and is accordingly represented by a grave accent over the _a_ to signify that this vowel forms a separate syllable, and by the acute accent over the _ture_ to indicate that this final syllable should receive more weight of pronunciation than usual. It accordingly appears as _creature_. In a similar way _con-dit-i-on_ would be a word of four syllables, and its pronunciation would be indicated by this method _condition_. It is never