In two other stories has Chaucer dwelt upon the pathos of childhood and bereft or suffering motherhood. In the Man of Law’s tale of Custance, there is a touching passage where Custance and her babe are driven away from the kingdom, and exposed to the sea in the ship which had brought them. The mother kneels upon the sand before embarking, and puts her trust in the Lord. “Her litel child lay wepying in hir arm, And knelynge, pitously to hym she seyde, ‘Pees litel sone, I wol do thee noon harm!’ With that hir kerchief of hir heed she breyde, And over hise litel eyen she it leyde, And in hir arm she lulleth it ful faste And in-to hevene hire eyen up she caste.” Then she commits herself and her child to Mary by the love of Mary’s child. “And up she rist, and walketh doun the stronde Toward the ship,—hir folweth al the prees,— And evere she preyeth hire child to hold his pees.” Again, in the Clerk’s tale of Patient Griselda, the effect of the story is greatly heightened by the narrative of the successive partings of the mother with her child; and the climax is reached in the burst of gladness and pent-up feeling which overtakes Griselda at the restoration of her son and daughter. It is noticeable that in these and other instances childhood appears chiefly as an appeal to pity, rarely as an object of direct love and joy. This is not to be wondered at when one considers the character of the English race, and the nature of the redemption which it has been undergoing in the slow process of its submission to the spirit of Christ. We say the English race, without stopping to make nice distinctions between the elements which existed at the time of the Great Charter, just as we may properly speak of the American people of the time of the Constitution. This character is marked by a brutality, a murderous spirit, which lies scarcely concealed, to-day, in the temper of every English crowd, and has left its mark on literature from the ballads to Oliver Twist. This brutal instinct, this rude, savage, northern spirit, is discovered in conflict with the disarming power of the spirit of Christ, and the stages of the conflict are most clearly indicated in poetry, which is to England what pictorial and sculpturesque art is to the south, the highest exponent of its spiritual life. More comprehensively, English literature affords the most complete means of measuring the advance of England in humanity.