Chaucer's procedure in regard to his romantic subjects is often very difficult to understand. How firm and unwavering his critical meditations and calculations were may be seen by a comparison of the _Knight's Tale_ with its Italian source. At other times and in other stories he appears to have worked on different principles, or without much critical study at all. The _Knight's Tale_ is a complete and perfect version of a medieval romance, worked out with all the resources of Chaucer's literary study and reflexion; tested and considered and corrected in every possible way. The story of _Constance_ (the _Man of Law's Tale_) is an earlier work in which almost everything is lacking that is found in the mere workmanship of the _Knight's Tale_; though not, of course, the humanity, the pathos, of Chaucer. The story of _Constance_ appears to have been taken by Chaucer from one of the least artificial specimens of medieval romance, the kind of romance that worked up in a random sort of way the careless sequence of incidents in a popular traditional tale. Just as the tellers of the stories in Campbell's _Highland Tales_, and other authentic collections, make no scruple about proportion where their memory happens to fail them or their irrelevant fancy to distract them, but go on easily, dropping out a symmetrical adventure here and there, and repeating a favourite "machine" if necessary or unnecessary; so the story of _Constance_ forgets and repeats itself. The voice is the voice of Chaucer, and so are the thoughts, but the order or disorder of the story is that of the old wives' tales when the old wives are drowsy. All the principal situations occur twice over; twice the heroine is persecuted by a wicked mother-in-law, twice sent adrift in a rudderless boat, twice rescued from a churl, and so on. In this story the poetry of Chaucer appears as something almost independent of the structure of the plot; there has been no such process of design and reconstruction as in the _Knight's Tale_. It is almost as strange to find Chaucer in other stories, as in the _Franklin's Tale_ and the _Clerk's Tale_, putting up with the most abstract medieval conventions of morality; the Point of Honour in the _Franklin's Tale_, and the unmitigated virtue of Griselda, are hopelessly opposed to anything like dramatic truth, and very far inferior as motives to the ethical ideas of many stories of the twelfth century. The truth of _Enid_ would have given no opportunity for the ironical verses in which Chaucer takes his leave of the Clerk of Oxford and his heroine. In these romances Chaucer leaves some old medieval difficulties unresolved and unreconciled, without attempting to recast the situation as he found it in his authorities, or to clear away the element of unreason in it. He takes the framework as he finds it, and embroiders his poetry over it, leaving an obvious discrepancy between his poetry and its subject-matter.