he wept to see a mouse caught, or if one of
her little dogs died. Can one be more "pitous"?

All those personages there were, and many more besides. There was the
Wife of Bath, that incomparable gossip, screaming all the louder as she
was "som-del deef." There was the jovial host, Harry Bailey, used to
govern and command, and to drown with his brazen voice the tumult of the
common table. There is also a person who looks thoughtful and kindly,
who talks little but observes everything, and who is going to
immortalise the most insignificant words pronounced, screamed, grumbled,
or murmured by his companions of a day, namely, Chaucer himself. With
its adventurers, its rich merchants, its Oxford clerks, its members of
Parliament, its workmen, its labourers, its saints, its great poet, it
is indeed the new England, joyous, noisy, radiant, all youthful and full
of life, that sits down, this April evening, at the board of "the Tabard
faste by the Belle." Where are now the Anglo-Saxons? But where are the
last year's snows? April has come.

The characters of romance, the statues on cathedrals, the figures in
missals, had been heretofore slender or slim, or awkward or stiff;
especially those produced by the English. Owing to one or the other of
these defects, those representations were not true to nature. Now we
have, in an English poem, a number of human beings, drawn from the
original, whose movements are supple, whose types are as varied as in
real life, depicted exactly as they were in their sentiments and in
their dress, so that it seems we see them, and when we part the
connection is not broken. The acquaintances made at "the Tabard faste by
the Belle" are not of those that can be forgotten; they are life-long
remembrances.

Nothing is omitted which can serve to fix, to anchor in our memory, the
vision of these personages. A half-line, that unveils the salient trait
of their characters, becomes impossible to forget; their attitudes,
their gestures, their clothes, their warts, the tones of their voices,
their defects of pronunciation--

Somwhat he lipsed for his wantonnesse--

their peculiarities, the host's red face and the reeve's yellow one,
their elegances, their arrows with peacock feathers, their bagpipes,
nothing is left out; their horses and the way they ride them are
described; Chaucer even peeps inside their bags and tells us what he
finds there.

So the new England has its Froissart, who is going to tell