The plot of this story is, as observed, not Chaucer's. But how carefully, how artistically the narrative is elaborated, incident by incident, and point by point! How well every effort is prepared, and how well every turn of the story is explained! Nothing is superfluous, but everything is arranged with care, down to the circumstances of the bottles being bought, for safety's sake, in the next street to the apothecary's, and of two out of three bottles being filled with poison, which is at once a proceeding natural in itself, and increases the chances against the two rioters when they are left to choose for themselves. This it is to be a good story-teller. But of a different order is the change introduced by Chaucer into his original, where the old hermit--who, of course, is Death himself--is fleeing from Death. Chaucer's Old Man is SEEKING Death, but seeking him in vain--like the Wandering Jew of the legend. This it is to be a poet. Of course it is always necessary to be cautious before asserting any apparent addition of Chaucer's to be his own invention. Thus, in the "Merchant's Tale," the very naughty plot of which is anything but original, it is impossible to say whether such is the case with the humorous competition of advice between Justinus and Placebo, ("Placebo" seems to have been a current term to express the character or the ways of "the too deferential man." "Flatterers be the Devil's chaplains, that sing aye Placebo."--"Parson's Tale."), or with the fantastic machinery in which Pluto and Proserpine anticipate the part played by Oberon and Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." On the other hand, Chaucer is capable of using goods manifestly borrowed or stolen for a purpose never intended in their original employment. Puck himself must have guided the audacious hand which could turn over the leaves of so respected a Father of the Church as St. Jerome, in order to derive from his treatise "On Perpetual Virginity" materials for the discourse on matrimony delivered, with illustrations essentially her own, by the "Wife of Bath."