What the reformer suppressed we can only conjecture, since the anterior impression, with the Popish leaven in it, has not fallen under our eyes. In lieu of the Saviour, the Virgin was, perhaps, made the central figure, with the general costume of the piece to correspond. What he added it is easier to judge; for, looking at the archaic narrative of “the Countryman who got into heaven by his pleading,” we perceive that _The New Wife of Bath_ is an amplification of the idea and scheme; and where the original middle-age story-teller was content with the ordeal of the Apostles and the First Person of the Trinity, his presbyterian follower thought it necessary to make the lady run the gauntlet of all the patriarchs and prophets, and even of our first parents, all of whom she triumphantly vanquishes, the concluding parley being with Christ Himself, who is made to come out on hearing the disturbance, and is overcome by her argumentative eloquence and confiding humility. With the portentous absurdity of the whole notion, both in its succincter and more enlarged shape, we need not occupy ourselves. I merely adduced the circumstance as one of the numerous phases of my subject; for I presume that no one will seriously question its title to a place in the semi-jocular category. Nothing is truer than the passage in Horace:-- “Multa renascentur, quæ jam cecidere ...” In the mediæval story of the Man with Wooden Legs, who succeeds in persuading a stranger that his apparent loss was a positive advantage and blessing, there is a property of permanence; for, as recently as 1885, a boat was capsized, and the only one who escaped was buoyed up by his artificial limb. This was a recommendation overlooked by the early _conteur_, anxious as he was to exhibit the unsuspected superiority of a substructure not prone to casualties, and not only renewable at pleasure, but useful as fuel when discarded from active service. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER VIII. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED--THE ANECDOTE-MONGER. The sophistication of anecdotes is undertaken for the sake of constructing fresh material for the entertainment of the general reader without resorting to original sources. It is of course a process which is confined, as a rule, to popular literature, and to literature only; yet I remember having once seen at an auction a large portrait of Charles II., where, without any becoming regard to the costume, a head of Charles I. was painted in, because the Martyred monarch was dearer to connoisseurs than the Merry one. The writers of the life of Charles Lamb have gone nearly as far by telling a story, in one version of which Benjamin Jonson figures, and in the other Dr. Johnson, as the personage quoted by Lamb. It was a case in which either would serve the turn; and variety pleases.