tration of this.

The vividness of his imagination, which conjures up, so to speak, the
very personality of his characters before him, and the contagious force
of his pathos, which is as true and as spontaneous as his humour,
complete in him the born dramatist. We can see Constance as with our
own eyes, in the agony of her peril:--

Have ye not seen some time a pallid face
Among a press, of him that hath been led
Towards his death, where him awaits no grace,
And such a colour in his face hath had,
Men mighte know his face was so bested
'Mong all the other faces in that rout?
So stands Constance, and looketh her about.

And perhaps there is no better way of studying the general character of
Chaucer's pathos, than a comparison of the "Monk's Tale" from which
this passage is taken, and the "Clerk's Tale," with their originals.
In the former, for instance, the prayer of Constance, when condemned
through Domegild's guilt to be cast adrift once more on the waters, her
piteous words and tenderness to her little child, as it lies weeping in
her arm, and her touching leave-taking from the land of the husband who
has condemned her,--all these are Chaucer's own. So also are parts of
one of the most affecting passages in the "Clerk's Tale"--Griseldis'
farewell to her daughter. But it is as unnecessary to lay a finger
upon lines and passages illustrating Chaucer's pathos, as upon others
illustrating his humour.

Thus, then, Chaucer was a born dramatist; but fate willed it, that the
branch of our literature which might probably have of all been the best
suited to his genius was not to spring into life till he and several
generations after him had passed away. To be sure, during the
fourteenth century, the so-called miracle-plays flourished abundantly
in England, and were, as there is every reason to believe, already
largely performed by the trading-companies of London and the towns.
The allusions in Chaucer to these beginnings of our English drama are,
however, remarkably scanty. The "Wife of Bath" mentions plays of
miracles among the other occasions of religious sensation haunted by
her, clad in her gay scarlet gown,--including vigils, processions,
preaching, pilgrimages, and marriages. And the jolly parish-clerk of
the "Miller's Tale," we are informed, at times, in order to show his
lightness and his skill, played "Herod on a scaffold high"--thus, by
the bye, emulating the parish clerks of London, who are k