Saints of Cupid" assumes the character of a kind of calendar of women
canonised by reason of their faithfulness to earthly love. But obviously
this is a method of treatment belonging to an age, not to a single poem or
poet. Chaucer's artistic judgment in the selection and arrangement of his
themes, the wonderful vivacity and true pathos with which he turns upon
Tarquin or Jason as if they had personally offended him, and his genuine
flow of feeling not only FOR but WITH his unhappy heroines, add a new
charm to the old familiar faces. Proof is thus furnished, if any proof
were needed, that no story interesting in itself is too old to admit of
being told again by a poet; in Chaucer's version Ovid loses something in
polish, but nothing in pathos; and the breezy freshness of nature seems to
be blowing through tales which became the delight of a nation's, as they
have been that of many a man's, youth.

A single passage must suffice to illustrate the style of the "Legend of
Good Women"; and it shall be the lament of Ariadne, the concluding passage
of the story which is the typical tale of desertion, though not, as it
remains in Chaucer, of desertion unconsoled. It will be seen how far the
English poet's vivacity is from being extinguished by the pathos of the
situation described by him.

Right in the dawening awaketh she,
And gropeth in the bed, and found right naught.
"Alas," quoth she, "that ever I was wrought!
I am betrayed!" and her hair she rent,
And to the strande barefoot fast she went,
And criede: "Theseus, mine hearte sweet!
Where be ye, that I may not with you meet?
And mighte thus by beastes been y-slain!"
The hollow rockes answered her again.