A rhetoricated poetic, though in other mouths than Geoffrey’s it has often had a fairer sound, is always a perversion. The confusion of poetic with rhetoric has always tended to obscure the imaginative value to narrative of onward movement. The medieval pedagogues who reduced the greatness of Vergil to mastery of all “three styles” of rhetoric would doubtless have recommended embellishing the eloquences of _Aucassin et Nicolete_ at the expense of the story, dilating the _Tombeor de Notre Dame_, and making the _Chastelaine de Vergi_ static. Their conception of narrative has no room for such composition as makes the Pardoner’s Tale a fatal sequence. Even Chaucer is too responsive to the taste of his time to abandon the accepted means of dilation. Some of his own apostrophes differ from Geoffrey’s to Friday[40] only in eloquence, not in method. But as early as the House of Fame he was critically aware of the “prolixitee” inherent in “colours of rethoryk.” The interpolated description, which he had elaborated to make the Knight’s Tale magnificent,[41] he parodied in _Sir Thopas_ and challenged through the Clerk and the Squire. In these passages he reminds us that his achievement of narrative composition had taught him to distrust rhetoric as a means of enhancing when the tale, Pardoner’s, Squire’s, or Franklin’s, was really the thing. Further he implies general denunciation of the staleness and ineptitude of medieval rhetoric as poetic method. 4. The Poetic of the _Canterbury Tales_ Within the Canterbury frame narrative composition is widely various. The early tale of the Man of Law follows the pattern of a saint’s legend; the Clerk’s is rather iterative than progressive. In such cases Chaucer has not recomposed; he has limited his art to style. What distinction he could achieve even so is most conspicuous in the exquisite tale of the Prioress. Without crisis, without even salience of moment, with no more reshaping than the shift of focus from the horror of ancient superstition to the beauty of childlike devotion, he wrought by adjustment of tone and cadence a marvel of simplicity. The Merchant infuses into his _fableau_ realistic suggestions of senile sexuality; but the _fableaux_ generally, Miller’s, Reeve’s, etc., are told in their typical form for their typical values. Beast epic in the mouth of the Nun’s Priest, never livelier and seldom so rich in suggestion, is little reshaped as a story. Even the Wife of Bath tells her fairy mistress tale without originality of composition.