in the exclamation of the faithful wife, tried beyond her power of
concealing the emotion within her:

O gracious God! how gentle and how kind
Ye seemed by your speech and your visage
The day that maked was our marriage.

So also in the "Man of Law's Tale," which is taken from the French, he
increases the vivacity of the narrative by a considerable number of
apostrophes in his own favourite manner, besides pleasing the general
reader by divers general reflexions of his own inditing. Almost
necessarily, the literary form and the self-consistency of his originals
lose under such treatment. But his dramatic sense, on which perhaps his
commentators have not always sufficiently dwelt, is rarely, if ever, at
fault. Two illustrations of this gift in Chaucer must suffice, which
shall be chosen in two quarters where he has worked with materials of the
most widely different kind. Many readers must have compared with Dante's
original (in canto 33 of the "Inferno") Chaucer's version in the "Monk's
Tale" of the story of Ugolino. Chaucer, while he necessarily omits the
ghastly introduction, expands the pathetic picture of the sufferings of
the father and his sons in their dungeon, and closes, far more briefly and
effectively than Dante, with a touch of the most refined pathos:--

DE HUGILINO COMITE PISAE.

Of Hugolin of Pisa the langour
There may no tongue telle for pity.
But little out of Pisa stands a tower,
In whiche tower in prison put was he;
And with him be his little children three.