affected. The
idea of entreating her husband, of throwing herself at his feet, of
trying to move him, never enters her mind; she would no longer be
playing her part, which is not to be a mother, but to be: Patience.

Chaucer left his collection of tales uncompleted; we have less than the
half of it; but he wrote enough to show to the best his manifold
qualities. There appear in perfect light his masterly gifts of
observation, of comprehension, and of sympathy; we well see with what
art he can make his characters stand forth, and how skilfully they are
chosen to represent all contemporaneous England. The poet shows himself
full of heart, and at the same time full of sense; he is not without
suspicion that his pious stories, indispensable to render his picture
complete, may offend by their monotony and exaggerated good sentiments.
In giving them place in his collection, he belongs to his time and helps
to make it known; but a few mocking notes, scattered here and there,
show that he is superior to his epoch, and that, in spite of his long
dissertations and his digressions, he has, what was rare at that period,
a certain notion, at least theoretical, of the importance of proportion.
He allows his heroes to speak, but he is not their dupe; in fact he is
so little their dupe that sometimes he can stand their talk no longer,
and interrupts them or laughs at them to their very face. He laughs in
the face of the tiresome Constance, on the night of her wedding; he
shows us his companions riding drowsily on their horses to the sound of
the monk's solemn stories, and hardly preserved from actual slumber by
the noise of the horse's bells. He allows the host abruptly to interrupt
him when, to satirise the romances of chivalry, he relates, in "rym
dogerel," the feats of arms and marvellous adventures of the matchless
Sir Thopas.[546] Before we could even murmur the word "improbable," he
warns us that the time of Griseldas has passed, and that there exist no
more such women in our day. As the pilgrims draw near Canterbury, and it
becomes seemly to finish on a graver note, he causes his poor parson to
speak, and the priest announces beforehand that his discourse will be a
sermon, a real sermon, with a text from Scripture: "Incipit sermo," says
one of the manuscripts. He will speak in prose, as in church:

Why sholde I sowen draf out of my fest,
Whan I may sowen whete if that me lest?

All agree, and it is with the assent of h