could not so gloriously err, and his creations have a harder, drier, more realistic look, are more like the people we hear uttering ordinary English speech, and see on ordinary country roads against an ordinary English sky.  If need were, any one of them could drive pigs to market.  Chaucer’s characters are individual enough, their idiosyncrasies are sharply enough defined, but they are to some extent literal and prosaic; they are of the “earth, earthy;” out of his imagination no Ariel ever sprang, no half-human, half-brutish Caliban ever crept.  He does not effloresce in illustrations and images, the flowers do not hide the grass; his pictures are masterpieces, but they are portraits, and the man is brought out by a multiplicity of short touches,—­caustic, satirical, and matter of fact.  His poetry may be said to resemble an English country road, on which passengers of different degrees of rank are continually passing,—­now knight, now boor, now abbot:  Spenser’s, for instance, and all the more fanciful styles, to a tapestry on which a whole Olympus has been wrought.  The figures on the tapestry are much the more noble-looking, it is true; but then they are dreams and phantoms, whereas the people on the country road actually exist.

The “Knight’s Tale”—­which is the first told on the way to Canterbury—­is a chivalrous legend, full of hunting, battle, and tournament.  Into it, although the scene is laid in Greece, Chaucer has, with a fine scorn of anachronism, poured all the splendour, colour, pomp, and circumstance of the fourteenth century.  It is brilliant as a banner displayed to the sunlight.  It is real cloth of gold.  Compared with it, “Ivanhoe” is a spectacle at Astley’s.  The style is everywhere more adorned than is usual, although even here, and in the richest parts, the short, homely, caustic Chaucerian line is largely employed.  The “Man of Law’s Tale,” again, is distinguished by quite a different merit.  It relates the sorrows and patience of Constance, and is filled with the beauty of holiness.  Constance might have been sister to Cordelia; she is one of the white lilies of womanhood.  Her story is almost the tenderest in our literature.  And Chaucer’s art comes out in this, that although she would spread her hair, nay, put her very heart beneath the feet of those who wrong her, we do not cease for one moment to respect her.  This is a feat which has but seldom been achieved.  It has long been a matter of reproach to Mr. Thackeray, for instance, that the only faculty with which he gifts his good women is a supreme faculty of tears.  To draw any very high degree of female patience is one of the most difficult of tasks.  If you represent a woman bearing wrong with a continuous unmurmuring meekness, presenting to blows, come from what quarter they may, nothing but a bent neck, and eyelids humbly drooped, you are in nine cases out of ten painting elaborately the portrait of a fool; and if you miss making her a fool, you are certain to make her a bore.