ABSTRACT
The popularity of any specific literary work is notoriously an uncertain criterion of merit, but the permanence of a literary form in popular favour cannot but indicate a basic fitness. Of all literary forms, or figures, the story has, first and last, most taken the fancy of men. Criticism has sometimes sought, to identify the ejaculations of primal life in its ooze with the first expressions of lyric poetry. Within more measurable horizons of experience, the lyric appears to have waited on a later development of society than narrative. Chaucer's language, on which much learning has been employed, presents no serious difficulty to the unlearned reader. Chaucer, like Shakespeare, made good use of borrowed material, but there the similarity ends. Chaucer's work as an originator imposed on him the heavy responsibilities of leadership, but it also gave him certain privileges.
