you miss
making her a fool, you are certain to make her a bore. 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 y