Yet he seems never to lose his good humor or his sweet complacency; there is no carping; there is no swearing that is in earnest. His whole character we seem to see in that picture of him which his friend Occleve painted; a miniature, to be sure, and upon the cover of a MS. of Occleve’s poems; but it is the best portrait of him we have. Looking at it--though ’tis only half length--you would say he was what we call a dapper man; well-fed, for he loved always the good things of life--“not drinkless altogether, as I guess;” nor yet is it a bluff English face; no beefiness; regular features--almost feminine in fineness of contour--with light beard upon upper lip and chin; smooth cheeks; lips full (rosy red, they say, in the painting); eye that is keen,[49] and with a sparkle of humor in it; hands decorously kept; one holding a rosary, the other pointing--and pointing as men point who see what they point at, and make others see it too; his hood, which seems a part of his woollen dress, is picturesquely drawn about his head, revealing only a streak of hair over his temple; you see it is one who studies picturesqueness even in costume, and to the trimming of his beard into a forked shape;--no lint on his robe--you may be sure of that;--no carelessness anywhere: dainty, delicate, studious of effects, but with mirth and good nature shimmering over his face. Yet no vagueness or shakiness of purpose show their weak lines; and in his jaw there is a certain staying power that kept him firm and active and made him pile book upon book in the new, sweet English tongue, which out of the dialects of Essex and of the East of England he had compounded, ordered, and perfected, and made the pride of every man born to the inheritance of that Island speech. And it is with such looks and such forces and such a constitutional cheeriness, that this blithe poet comes to the task of enchaining together his Canterbury Tales, with their shrewd trappings of Prologue--his best work, getting its last best touches after he is fairly turned of middle age, if indeed he were not already among the sixties. Is it not wonderful--the distinctness with which we see, after five hundred years have passed, those nine and twenty pilgrims setting out on the sweet April day, to travel down through the country highways and meadows of Kent! The fields are all green, “y-powdered with daisies;” the birds are singing; the white blossoms are beginning to show upon the hedge-rows. And the Pilgrims, one and all, are so touched and colored by his shrewdness and aptness of epithet that we see them as plainly as if they had been cut out, figure by figure, from the very middle of that far-away century. There goes the Knight-- And that a worthy man, That from the timë that he first began To ryden out, he lovéd chyvalrie Trouth and honoúr, freedom and courtesie. And after him his son, the Squire, the bright bachelor, who