"Before I finally dismiss the subject, I think I may be permitted to observe that, when these volumes first appeared, a work bearing distinctly the title of _Tales_, professedly adapted to different countries, and either abruptly commencing with, or breaking suddenly into, a sort of dramatic dialogue, was a novelty in the fiction of the day. Innumerable _Tales_ of the same stamp, and adapted in the same manner to all classes and all countries, have since appeared; with many of which I presume not to compete in merit, though I think I may fairly claim priority of design and style." _The Canterbury Tales_ were read and reread a long time after they were written. A critic in _Blackwood's_ says of them: "They exhibit more of that species of invention which, as we have already remarked, was never common in English literature than any of the works of the first-rate novelists we have named, with the single exception of Fielding." The most famous story of the collection is _Kruitzener, or the German's Tale_. Part of the story is laid in Silesia during the Thirty Years' War. Frederick Kruitzener, a Bohemian, is the hero, if such a term may be used for so weak a man. In his youth he is thus described: "The splendour, therefore, which the united efforts of education, fortune, rank, and the merits of his progenitors threw around him, was early mistaken for a personal gift--a sort of emanation proceeding from the lustre of his own endowments, and for which, as he believed, he was indebted to nature, he resolved not to be accountable to man.... He was distinguished!--he saw it--he felt it--he was persuaded he should ever be so; and while yet a youth in the house of his father--dependent on his paternal affection, and entitled to demand credit of the world merely for what he was to be--he secretly looked down on that world as made only for him." The tale traces the troubles which Kruitzener brings upon himself, his misery and his death. It belongs to romantic literature; the mountain scenes, a palace with secret doors, a secret gallery, a false friend, a mysterious murder, all these remind us of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, but the story does not possess her power or her poetic charm. Ernest Hartley Coleridge said of this tale: "But the _motif_--a son predestined to evil by the weakness and sensuality of his father, a father's punishment for his want of rectitude by the passionate criminality of his son, is the very key-note of tragedy."