The Canterbury Tales

                      THE CANTERBURY TALES
                         And other Poems
                               of
                        GEOFFREY CHAUCER

                   Edited for Popular Perusal
                               by
                         D. Laing Purves



                            CONTENTS


PREFACE
LIFE OF CHAUCER
THE CANTERBURY TALES
     The General Prologue
     The Knight's Tale
     The Miller's tale
     The Reeve's Tale
     The Cook's Tale
     The Man of Law's Tale
     The Wife of Bath's Tale
     The Friar's Tale
     The Sompnour's Tale
     The Clerk's Tale
     The Merchant's Tale
     The Squire's Tale
     The Franklin's Tale
     The Doctor's Tale
     The Pardoner's Tale
     The Shipman's Tale
     The Prioress's Tale
     Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas
     Chaucer's Tale of Meliboeus
     The Monk's Tale
     The Nun's Priest's Tale
     The Second Nun's Tale
     The Canon's Yeoman's Tale
     The Manciple's Tale
     The Parson's Tale
     Preces de Chauceres
THE COURT OF LOVE <1>
THE CUCKOO AND THE NIGHTINGALE <1>
THE ASSEMBLY OF FOWLS
THE FLOWER AND THE LEAF <1>
THE HOUSE OF FAME
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
CHAUCER'S DREAM <1>
THE PROLOGUE TO THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN
CHAUCER'S A.B.C.
MISCELLANEOUS POEMS


Transcriber's Note.

1. Modern scholars believe that Chaucer was not the author of
these poems.



                            PREFACE.


THE object of this volume is to place before the general reader
our two early poetic masterpieces -- The Canterbury Tales and
The Faerie Queen; to do so in a way that will render their
"popular perusal" easy in a time of little leisure and unbounded
temptations to intellectual languor; and, on the same conditions,
to present a liberal and fairly representative selection from the
less important and familiar poems of Chaucer and Spenser.
There is, it may be said at the outset, peculiar advantage and
propriety in placing the two poets side by side in the manner
now attempted for the first time.  Although two centuries divide
them, yet Spenser is the direct and really the immediate
successor to the poetical inheritance of Chaucer.  Those two
hundred years, eventful as they were, produced no poet at all
worthy to take up the mantle that fell from Chaucer's shoulders;
and Spenser does not need his affected archaisms, nor his
frequent and reverent appeals to "Dan Geffrey," to vindicate for
himself a place very close to his great predecessor in the literary
history of England. If Chaucer is the "Well of English
undefiled," Spenser is the broad and stately river that yet holds
the tenure of its very life from the fountain far away in other
and ruder scenes.

The Canterbury Tales, so far as they are in verse, have been
printed without any abridgement or designed change in the
sense.  But the two Tales in prose -- Chaucer's Tale of
Meliboeus, and the Parson's long Sermon on Penitence -- have
been contracted, so as to exclude thirty pages of unattractive
prose, and to admit the same amount of interesting and
characteristic poetry.  The gaps thus made in the prose Tales,
however, are supplied by careful outlines of the omitted matter,
so that the reader need be at no loss to comprehend the whole
scope and sequence of the original.  With The Faerie Queen a
bolder course has been pursued. The great obstacle to the
popularity of Spencer's splendid work has lain less in its
language than in its length.  If we add together the three great