Your patient woman, in books and in life, does not draw on our gratitude.  When her goodness is not stupidity,—­which it frequently is,—­it is insulting.  She walks about an incarnate rebuke.  Her silence is an incessant complaint.  A teacup thrown at your head is not half so alarming as her meek, much-wronged, unretorting face.  You begin to suspect that she consoles herself with the thought that there is another world, where brutal brothers and husbands are settled with for their behaviour to their angelic wives and sisters in this.  Chaucer’s Constance is neither fool nor bore, although in the hands of anybody else she would have been one or the other, or both.  Like the holy religion which she symbolises, her sweet face draws blessing and love wherever it goes; it heals old wounds with its beauty, it carries peace into the heart of discord, it touches murder itself into soft and penitential tears.  In reading the old tender-hearted poet, we feel that there is something in a woman’s sweetness and forgiveness that the masculine mind cannot fathom; and we adore the hushed step and still countenance of Constance almost as if an angel passed.

Chaucer’s orthography is unquestionably uncouth at first sight; but it is not difficult to read if you keep a good glossary beside you for occasional reference, and are willing to undergo a little trouble.  The language is antique, but it is full of antique flavour.  Wine of excellent vintage originally, it has improved through all the years it has been kept.  A very little trouble on the reader’s part, in the reign of Anne, would have made him as intelligible as Addison; a very little more, in the reign of Queen Victoria, will make him more intelligible than Mr. Browning.  Yet somehow it has been a favourite idea with many poets that he required modernisation, and that they were the men to do it.  Dryden, Pope, and Wordsworth have tried their hands on him.  Wordsworth performed his work in a reverential enough spirit; but it may be doubted whether his efforts have brought the old poet a single new reader.  Dryden and Pope did not translate or modernise Chaucer, they committed assault and battery upon him.  They turned his exquisitely naive humour into their own coarseness, they put doubles entendre into his mouth, they blurred his female faces,—­as a picture is blurred when the hand of a Vandal is drawn over its yet wet colours,—­and they turned his natural descriptions into the natural descriptions of “Windsor Forest” and the “Fables.”  The grand old writer does not need translation or modernisation; but perhaps, if it be done at all, it had better be reached in that way.  For the benefit of younger readers, I subjoin short prose versions of two of the “Canterbury Tales,”—­a story-book than which the world does not possess a better.  Listen, then, to the tale the Knight told as the pilgrims rode to Canterbury:—­