No triumph of Chaucer’s is more evident than the art of narrative swiftness in the tale of the Pardoner. Verse narrative has nothing more seizing, more breathless, more fatal. Yet even this is no greater than the art that reveals the Pardoner himself. The tale is no more triumphant than the interlude and the prologue. Rather they belong together. So the ordinary romance told by the Wife of Bath is heard amid the echoes of her brutal realism. The familiar story of the cock and the fox takes both color and shape from the Nun’s Priest. Readers opening their _Canterbury Tales_ for the second time, or the third or the tenth, are as likely to turn to an interlude as to a tale. Even an adequate account of the poetic of every tale would fall short of the total artistic value. For the interludes play a part in a scheme more ambitious than any other medieval “framework”. Gower’s plan in the _Confessio Amantis_ is no more than a classified series. The preface to the _Decameron_ proposes “a hundred tales ... told in ten days by a noble company of seven ladies and three youths in the time of the late pestilence ... in the which tales appear pleasant or rude chances of love and other incidents of fortune happening as well in modern times as in ancient.” After describing the plague in Florence, the “noble company”, and the fair country house to which they withdrew for safety, Boccaccio makes each of his ten persons tell a tale each day on the same general theme. Thus he arranges ten groups of ten tales each, with charming interludes of conversation, song, and description. But only the charm of style saves the connective from monotony. The narrators are merely mouthpieces; the interludes are not used, as by Chaucer, to bring about contrast and interchange; the setting, though more attractive than the allegorical fiction of the _Confessio Amantis_, is merely repeated with variations. The ancient plan of _The Seven Sages_ remains inflexible through all the versions. The king, stayed by the tale of the first sage, finds the queen in tears, and is won back by her counter-tale to reaffirm his sentence on the prince. With mere variation of the dialogue this scene is repeated six times. Instead of being always different, as in the _Canterbury Tales_, the interlude is always substantially the same. Not only are the tales generally alike in form, being all by the necessity of the plan _exempla_, but the plan itself is little more than a vehicle.