Who can find these in our compendiums?
they must be dug--and dry work it is--out of profounder histories, or found, with greater pleasure, in poems like that of Chaucer.
CHARACTERS .-- Let us consider, then, a few of his principal characters which most truly represent the age and nation.
The Tabard inn at Southwark, then a suburb of "London borough without the walls," was a great rendezvous for pilgrims who were journeying to the shrine of St.Thomas a Becket, at Canterbury--that Saxon archbishop who had been murdered by the minions of Henry II.

Southwark was on the high street, the old Roman highway from London to the southeast.

A gathering of pilgrims here is no uncommon occurrence; and thus numbers and variety make a combination of penitence and pleasure.

The host of the Tabard--doubtless a true portraiture of the landlord of that day--counts noses, that he may distribute the pewter plates.

A substantial supper smokes upon the old-fashioned Saxon-English board--so substantial that the pilgrims are evidently about to lay in a good stock, in anticipation of poor fare, the fatigue of travel, and perhaps a fast or two not set down in the calendar.
As soon as they attack the viands, ale and strong wines, hippocras, pigment, and claret, are served in bright pewter and wood.