rk of Oxford" has in his cloistered solitude, where all
womanly blandishments are unknown, come to the conclusion that:

Men speak of Job, most for his humbleness,
As clerkes, when they list, can well indite,
Of men in special; but, in truthfulness,
Though praise by clerks of women be but slight,
No man in humbleness can him acquit
As women can, nor can be half so true
As women are, unless all things be new.

As to marriage, Chaucer may be said generally to treat it in that style
of laughing with a wry mouth, which has from time immemorial been
affected both in comic writing and on the comic stage, but which, in
the end, even the most determined old bachelor feels an occasional
inclination to consider monotonous.

In all this, however, it is obvious that something at least must be set
down to conventionality. Yet the best part of Chaucer's nature, it is
hardly necessary to say, was neither conventional nor commonplace. He
was not, we may rest assured, one of that numerous class which in his
days, as it does in ours, composed the population of the land of
Philistia--the persons so well defined by the Scottish poet, Sir David
Lyndsay (himself a courtier of the noblest type):--

Who fixed have their hearts and whole intents
On sensual lust, on dignity, and rents.

Doubtless Chaucer was a man of practical good sense, desirous of
suitable employment and of a sufficient income; nor can we suppose him
to have been one of those who look upon social life and its enjoyments
with a jaundiced eye, or who, absorbed in things which are not of this
world, avert their gaze from it altogether. But it is hardly possible
that rank and position should have been valued on their own account by
one who so repeatedly recurs to his ideal of the true gentleman, as to
a conception dissociated from mere outward circumstances, and more
particularly independent of birth or inherited wealth. At times, we
know, men find what they seek; and so Chaucer found in Boethius and in
Guillaume de Lorris that conception which he both translates and
reproduces, besides repeating it in a little "Ballade," probably
written by him in the last decennium of his life. By far the
best-known and the finest of these passages is that in the "Wife of
Bath's Tale," which follows the round assertion that the "arrogance"
against which it protests is not worth a hen; and which is followed by
an appeal to a parallel passage in Dante:--

Look, w