The language needed a forming, controlling, fixing hand.

The English mind needed a leader and master, English imagination a guide, English literature a father.
The person who answered to this call, and who was equal to all these demands, was Chaucer.

But he was something more.

He claimed only to be a poet, while he was to figure in after times as historian, philosopher, and artist.
The scope of this work does not permit an examination of Chaucer's writings in detail, but the position we have taken will be best illustrated by his greatest work, the Canterbury Tales.

Of the others, a few preliminary words only need be said.