erable, seems hardly to admit of
denial. But while Chaucer freely borrowed from foreign models, he had
long passed beyond the stage of translating without assimilating. It
would be rash to assume that where he altered he invariably improved.
His was not the unerring eye which, like Shakspere's in his dramatic
transfusions of Plutarch, missed no particle of the gold mingled with
the baser metal, but rejected the dross with sovereign certainty. In
dealing with Italian originals more especially, he sometimes altered
for the worse, and sometimes for the better; but he was never a mere
slavish translator. So in the "Knight's Tale" he may be held in some
points to have deviated disadvantageously from his original; but, on
the other hand, in the "Clerk's Tale," he inserts a passage on the
fidelity of women, and another on the instability of the multitude,
besides adding a touch of nature irresistibly pathetic in the
exclamation of the faithful wife, tried beyond her power of concealing
the emotion within her:

O gracious God! how gentle and how kind
Ye seemed by your speech and your visage
The day that maked was our marriage.

So also in the "Man of Law's Tale," which is taken from the French, he
increases the vivacity of the narrative by a considerable number of
apostrophes in his own favourite manner, besides pleasing the general
reader by divers general reflexions of his own inditing. Almost
necessarily, the literary form and the self-consistency of his
originals lose under such treatment. But his dramatic sense, on which
perhaps his commentators have not always sufficiently dwelt, is rarely,
if ever, at fault. Two illustrations of this gift in Chaucer must
suffice, which shall be chosen in two quarters where he has worked with
materials of the most widely different kind. Many readers must have
compared with Dante's original (in canto 33 of the "Inferno") Chaucer's
version in the "Monk's Tale" of the story of Ugolino. Chaucer, while
he necessarily omits the ghastly introduction, expands the pathetic
picture of the sufferings of the father and his sons in their dungeon,
and closes, far more briefly and effectively than Dante, with a touch
of the most refined pathos:--

DE HUGILINO COMITE PISAE.

Of Hugolin of Pisa the langour
There may no tongue telle for pity.
But little out of Pisa stands a tower,
In whiche tower in prison put was he;
And with him be his little children three.
The eldes