Excerpt from The Tale of Beryn: With a Prologue of the Merry Adventure of the Pardoner With a Tapster at Canterbury; Plans of Canterbury in 1588, and the Road Thither From London in 1675, &C
If this Tale of Beryn had not occurrd in a manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and had also not been unique and not heretofore printed with fair accuracy, it would yet have claimd a place among the Chaucer Society"s books, by reason of its giving the only good nearly-contemporary account, by a Canterbury man - monk, I suppose: see the colophon, p. 120 - of how pilgrims like Chaucer"s disported themselves in the town, and at the Shrine of the Martyr whom from "euery schires ende" they sought. That Chaucer intended to have given us such an account himself, we can hardly doubt. The scenes at the "Checker of the Hope," in the Cathedral and the town, must have afforded him so many a chance for a happy line, a humourous touch, that he must have thought of sketching his companions in their fresh surroundings; but alas, this, like the Tales awanting, was never to be; and we have to rely on a poorer hand for the outline and details we desire. Still, worse than Chaucer"s though the hand of the Beryn-writer is, a bit, and a good bit, of the Master"s humour and lifelikeness, the later verser has in his Prologue.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Tale of Beryn (F. J. Furnivall)