feats of arms
and love stories glowing with colour, and take us hither and thither,
through highways and byways, giving ear to every tale, observing,
noting, relating? This young country has Froissart and better than
Froissart. The pictures are as vivid and as clear, but two great
differences distinguish the ones from the others: humour and sympathy.
Already we find humour well developed in Chaucer; his sly jests
penetrate deeper than French jests; he does not go so far as to wound,
but he does more than merely prick skin-deep; and in so doing, he
laughs silently to himself. There was once a merchant,

That riche was, for which men helde him wys.[528]

The "Sergeant of Lawe" was a busy man indeed:

No wher so bisy a man as he ther nas,
And yet he semed bisier than he was.

Moreover, Chaucer sympathises; he has a quivering heart that tears move,
and that all sufferings touch, those of the poor and those of princes.
The role of the people, so marked in English literature, affirms itself
here, from the first moment. "There are some persons," says, for his
justification, a French author, "who think it beneath them to bestow a
glance on what opinion has pronounced ignoble; but those who are a
little more philosophic, who are a little less the dupes of the
distinctions that pride has introduced into the affairs of this world,
will not be sorry to see the sort of man there is inside a coachman, and
the sort of woman inside a petty shopkeeper." Thus, by a great effort of
audacity, as it seems to him, Marivaux expresses himself in 1731.[529]
Chaucer, even in the fourteenth century, is curious to see the sort of
man a cook of London may be, and the sort of woman a Wife of Bath is.
How many wretches perish in Froissart! What blood; what hecatombs; and
how few tears! Scarcely here and there, and far apart, words absently
spoken about so much suffering: "And died the common people of hunger,
which was great pity."[530] Why lament long, or marvel at it? It is the
business and proper function of the common people to be cut to pieces;
they are the raw material of feats of arms, and as such only figure in
the narrative.

They figure in Chaucer's narrative, because Chaucer _loves_ them; he
loves his plowman, "a true swinker and a good," who has strength enough
and to spare in his two arms, and helps his neighbours for nothing; he
suffers at the thought of the muddy lanes along which his poor parson
must go in winter, t