so.
Perhaps no better example of his skill in this respect could be cited
than the "Manciple's Tale," with its rapid narrative, its major and
minor catastrophe, and its concise moral ending thus:--

My son, beware, and be no author new
Of tidings, whether they be false or true;
Whereso thou comest, among high or low,
Keep well thy tongue, and think upon the crow.

At the same time, his frequently recurring announcements of his desire
to be brief have the effect of making his narrative appear to halt, and
thus unfortunately defeat their own purpose. An example of this may be
found in the "Knight's Tale," a narrative poem of which, in contrast
with its beauties, a want of evenness is one of the chief defects. It
is not that the desire to suppress redundancies is a tendency deserving
anything but commendation in any writer, whether great or small; but
rather, that the art of concealing art had not yet dawned upon Chaucer.
And yet, few writers of any time have taken a more evident pleasure in
the process of literary production, and have more visibly overflowed
with sympathy for, or antipathy against, the characters of their own
creation. Great novelists of our own age have often told their
readers, in prefaces to their fictions or in quasi-confidential
comments upon them, of the intimacy in which they have lived with the
offspring of their own brain, to them far from shadowy beings. But
only the naivete of Chaucer's literary age, together with the vivacity
of his manner of thought and writing, could place him in so close a
personal relation towards the personages and the incidents of his
poems. He is overcome by "pity and ruth" as he reads of suffering, and
his eyes "wax foul and sore" as he prepares to tell of its infliction.
He compassionates "love's servants" as if he were their own "brother
dear;" and into his adaptation of the eventful story of Constance (the
"Man of Law's Tale") he introduces apostrophe upon apostrophe, to the
defenceless condition of his heroine--to her relentless enemy the
Sultana, and to Satan, who ever makes his instrument of women "when he
will beguile"--to the drunken messenger who allowed the letter carried
by him to be stolen from him,--and to the treacherous Queen-mother who
caused them to be stolen. Indeed, in addressing the last-named
personage, the poet seems to lose all control over himself.

O Domegild, I have no English digne
Unto thy malice and thy tyranny:
An