Whereupon the steadfast parson proceeds to assure the company that whatever he may have in his male [wallet] there is none of your light-minded and fictitious verse in it; nothing but grave and reverend prose. This Persoun him answerede al at oones: Thou getest fable noon i-told for me. (And you will presently observe that "fable" in the parson's mind means very much the same with verse or poetry, and that the whole business of fiction--that same fiction which has now come to occupy such a commanding place with us moderns, and which we are to study with such reverence under its form of the novel--implies downright lying and wickedness.) Thou getist fable noon i-told for me; For Paul, that writeth unto Timothe, Repreveth hem that weyveth soothfastnesse. And tellen fables and such wrecchednesse, etc., For which I say, if that yow list to heere Moralite and virtuous mateere, (That is--as we shall presently see--_prose_). And thanne that ye will geve me audience, I wol ful fayne at Cristes reverence, Do you pleasaunce leful, as I can; But trusteth wel, I am a Suthern man, I can nat geste, rum, ram, ruf, by letter, Ne, God wot, rym hold I but litel better; And therfor, if yow list, I wol not glose, I wol yow telle a mery tale in prose. Here our honest parson, (and he was honest;) I am frightfully tempted to go clean away from my path and read that heart-filling description of him which Chaucer gives in the general Prologue to the _Canterbury Tales_ sweeps away the whole literature of verse and of fiction with the one contemptuous word "glose"--by which he seems to mean a sort of shame-faced lying all the more pitiful because done in verse--and sets up prose as the proper vehicle for "moralite and virtuous mateere." With this idea of the function of prose, you will not be surprised to find, as I read these opening sentences of the pastor's so-called tale, that the style is rigidly sententious, and that the movement of the whole is like that of a long string of proverbs, which, of course, presently becomes intolerably droning and wearisome. The parson begins: "Many ben the weyes espirituels that leden folk to our Lord Ihesu Crist, and to the regne of glorie; of whiche weyes ther is a ful noble wey, which may not faile to no man ne to womman, that thurgh synne hath mysgon fro the right wey of Jerusalem celestial; and this wey is cleped penitence. Of which men schulden gladly herken and enquere with al here herte, to wyte, what is penitence, and whens is cleped penitence? And in what maner and in how many maneres been the acciones or workynge of penitence, and how many speces ben of penitence, and which thinges apperteynen and byhoven to penitence and whiche thinges destourben penitence."