brows of the wayfarer, are not there by haphazard:  they are the results of occult forces, a whole solar system has had a hand in their production.  From the apparent ease with which an artist works, one does not readily give him credit for the mental force he is continuously putting forth.  To many people, a chaotic “Festus” is more wonderful than a rounded, melodious “Princess.”  The load which a strong man bears gracefully does not seem so heavy as the load which the weaker man staggers under.  Incompletion is force fighting; completion is force quiescent, its work done.  Nature’s forces are patent enough in some scarred volcanic moon in which no creature can breathe; only the sage, in some soft green earth, can discover the same forces reft of fierceness and terror, and translated into sunshine, and falling dew, and the rainbow gleaming on the shower.  It is somewhat in this way that the propriety of Hazlitt’s criticism is to be vindicated.  Chaucer is the most simple, natural, and homely of our poets, and whatever he attempts he does thoroughly.  The Wife of Bath is so distinctly limned that she could sit for her portrait.  You can count the embroidered sprigs in the jerkin of the squire.  You hear the pilgrims laugh as they ride to Canterbury.  The whole thing is admirably life-like and seems easy, and in the seeming easiness we are apt to forget the imaginative sympathy which bodies forth the characters, and the joy and sorrow from which that sympathy has drawn nurture.  Unseen by us, the ore has been dug, and smelted in secret furnaces, and when it is poured into perfect moulds, we are apt to forget by what potency the whole thing has been brought about.

And, with his noticing eyes, into what a brilliant, many tinted world was Chaucer born!  In his day life had a certain breadth, colour, and picturesqueness which it does not possess now.  It wore a braver dress, and flaunted more in the sun.  Five centuries effect a great change on manners.  A man may nowadays, and without the slightest suspicion of the fact, brush clothes with half the English peerage on a sunny afternoon in Pall Mall.  Then it was quite different.  The fourteenth century loved magnificence and show.  Great lords kept princely state in the country; and when they came abroad, what a retinue, what waving of plumes, and shaking of banners, and glittering of rich dresses!  Religion was picturesque, with dignitaries, and cathedrals, and fuming incense, and the Host carried through the streets.  The franklin kept open house, the city merchant feasted kings, the outlaw roasted his venison beneath the greenwood tree.  There was a gallant monarch and a gallant court.  The eyes of the Countess of Salisbury shed influence; Maid Marian laughed in Sherwood.  London is already a considerable place, numbering, perhaps, two hundred thousand inhabitants, the houses clustering close and high along the river banks; and on the beautiful April nights the nightingales are