Nicolette_, it was but a flash. The interest was concentrated in the hero and heroine, and though some faithful servant or lady-in-waiting might assist their lovers, it would have been regarded as undignified in the extreme to give prominence to such a character. Chaucer flings dignity to the winds. What he cares for is truth to life, and already he has made the great discovery that certain persons are not told off by nature to be unhappy and certain others to be amusing, but that a perfectly common-place and ordinary individual may play a part in tragedy without even realising what tragedy is. He studies a man, not because he is unusual, but just because he is the kind of person to be met with any day, and by using Pandarus as a foil he prevents the high-flown emotion of the lovers from becoming absurd or monotonous. Chaucer evidently realised to the full the attractiveness and the dramatic possibilities of this form of literature, but at the same time his eyes were open to its shortcomings. In the _Squieres Tale_ we have a typical romance in which love, magic, and adventure are all blended together. It has the true medieval air of having all eternity in which to tell its story. It begins with an account of King Cambinskan, his two sons Algarsif and Cambalo, and his daughter Canace, and the coming of the magic gifts--the steed of brass which will carry its rider whithersoever he desires, the mirror which shows if any adversity is about to befall its owner, the ring which enables its wearer to understand the speech of the birds and also gives knowledge of the healing properties of all herbs, and the sword whose edge will cut through any armour and the flat of whose blade will cure the wound so made. Any one of these would in itself be sufficient to furnish forth a tale, and when we find them heaped together with so lavish a hand at the very beginning, we know what to expect. Three hundred and four of the squire's 361 lines are occupied with the apparently irrelevant story of the love-lorn falcon and the faithless tercelet. Even this is not ended. Canace uses her knowledge of simples for the poor hawk's benefit, and cures its wounds and swears to redress its wrongs; but having got thus far the narrator draws breath and then plunges into a list of further episodes with which he intends to deal:-- Thus lete I Canace hir hauk keping; I wol na-more as now speke of hir ring, Til it come eft to purpos for to seyn How that this faucon gat hir love ageyn Repentant, as the storie telleth us. * * * * *