THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
immense variety in the Canterbury Tales, and yet, persisting underneath, one consistent type. Chaucer has his world; he has his young men; he has his young women. If one met them straying in Shakespeare’s world one would know them to be Chaucer’s, not Shakespeare’s. He wants to describe a girl, and this is what she looks like:
Ful semely hir wimpel pinched was,
Hir nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas;
Hir mouth ful smal, and ther-to soft and reed;
But sikerly she hadde a fair foreheed;
It was almost a spanne brood, I trowe;
For, hardily, she was nat undergrowe.
Then he goes on to develop her; she was a girl, a virgin, cold in her virginity:
I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye,
A mayde, and love hunting and venerye,
And for to walken in the wodes wilde,
And noght to been a wyf and be with childe.
Next he bethinks him how
Discreet she was in answering alway;
And though she had been as wise as Pallas
No countrefeted termes hadde she
To seme wys; but after hir degree
She spak, and alle hir wordes more and lesse
Souninge in vertu and in gentillesse.
Each of these quotations, in fact, comes from a different Tale, but they are parts, one feels, of the same
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