plain-speaking; the poor Parson, who not only
taught the lore of Christ and his Apostles, but
first followed it himself; the Reve, slender and
choleric; the Sompnour, with a face like that
of a "fire-red cherubin," and who, when drunk,
would speak in nothing but Latin; the
Pardoner, the Ploughman, the Miller, and all the
others of that famous company;—these men
and women, even though they were but the
generalisations of Chaucer's genius from a wide
observation of English manners, are nevertheless
real living beings to us who see them at the
distance of five hundred years in all the elaborate
vitality of actual existence. The tradesmen
who kept shop along the High-street then, much
as they keep it now, have vanished utterly,—
are, to our poor human perceptions, less than
ghosts and shadows—are absolutely nought.
But these brain-children live, and defy chance
and mutability. We see them move and act;
we hear them talk and jest. Their vanities and
passions endure as ours shall not endure; their
very raiment has a kind of immortality in it.
Standing in the external balcony of this old inn,
and looking down into the court-yard where the
pilgrims assembled previous to starting (for, at
least, if anywhere, it was on this spot), I find
the motley company rising again in form and
colour, dividing into groups, or filing in stately
procession through the gateway. It is a hot
midsummer day as I stand here, and the brooding
noontide sultriness and silence seem to bring
a weird enchantment over the old place. I forget
the modern accessories by which I am
surrounded. I forget the railway, and the electric
telegraph, and Tooley-street, and the warehouses
which the great fire ravaged so in 1861, and
omnibuses, and cabs, and Pickford's vans. I
am stranded in a little nook of ancient times,
and the very dust about me is the dust of buried
days.

The oldest part of the inn lies back from
the road, and is reached by passing under a
house. You then find yourself in a court-yard,
with the existing tavern to the right—itself far
from a new building, yet much more modern
than the rest, and constructed, not of timber,
but of brick. Immediately in front, as you
enter from the High-street, and also to the left
—thus making an angle, and occupying two
sides of the court-yard—is the antique, timber-
built hostelry, with wooden galleries, external
staircase, and high sloping roof, which, there
seems some reason to believe, is partially the
same edifice as that which Chaucer must have
seen. I observe, indeed, that Mr. Peter
Cunningham, in his excellent Handbook of London,
says that "no part of the existing inn is of the
age of Chaucer, but a good deal of the age of
Elizabeth." The point, however, does not
appear at all certain. Speght, writing at the
same time as Stow, speaks of the house as
being the one from which Chaucer and the
pilgrims started, and he adds that, having
become "much decayed" through the effects of
time, it had then been recently "repaired" by
"Master J. Preston," with the addition of many
new rooms for the reception of guests. From
this, then, it would seem that the house was
only renovated and enlarged, not entirely rebuilt,
at the time of Speght's writing. The best part of
a hundred years later, however, a serious calamity
befel the Tabard, and we shall have to examine
whether that calamity deprived us of all traces
of the original building. In 1676, a great fire
broke out in Southwark about four o'clock in
the morning of the 26th of May, and, according
to the account given in the London Gazette
of the 29th of the same month, "continued
with much violence all that day and part of the
night following, notwithstanding all the care of
the Duke of Monmouth, the Earl of Craven,
and the Lord Mayor, to quench the same by
blowing up houses, and otherwise." In this
conflagration, about six hundred houses were
destroyed, either by the fire itself, or by being
blown up. That a portion of the Tabard perished
on the occasion, seems to be certain, because
Aubrey, who lived at the time, alludes to the
fact; but the older part of the building, as we
now see it, can hardly have been erected as late
as the end of the seventeenth century, as the
style of architecture is manifestly that of a
much earlier period. "Galleries like this,"
writes Mr. John Saunders, in his interesting
paper on the Tabard in Mr. Charles Knight's
London, "belong not to the time of Charles the
Second;" nor, it may be added, do the rooms
which open on to the gallery, nor the passages
and corridors, nor the queer old attics, nor indeed
any of the features of the place. The house in
the High-street, under which you pass to gain
the court-yard, was doubtless built after the
fire in 1676; so, perhaps, was the tavern to the
right of the gateway, where you may sit in a
little bar-parlour, and order refreshments in a
little bar; but the timber edifice at the back,
and to the left hand, is unquestionably much
older. The great question is as to the amount
of rebuilding carried out by Master J. Preston.
The fairest interpretation of Speght's words
seems to be, that a portion of the Chaucerian
hostelry survived the alterations and repairs;
and, if so, it is almost certain that that portion
remains to this day.

At any rate, the house has an hereditary
connexion with the masterpiece of our first great
poet, and it is certainly old, and quaint, and
interesting. Ascending into the gallery, under
the guidance of one of the female servants of
the inn, who seems to take as lively a concern
in the antiquities of the place as though she
were an antiquary, I enter one by one the little,
mouldering, dusky, panelled rooms, some of
them still occupied as dormitories, some empty
and unused, in which the very air seems heavy
with a weight of centuries. There is something
ghostly about the place, it is so much a thing
of the past, and lingers so strangely in the full
daylight of the present. The old timber, doubtless,
is firm enough at the heart, for the floors
are solid to the tread, and seem as if they would
last a long while yet; but the surface of the
great beams and panels crumbles to the touch,