In reading page after page of this bagpipe-bass, one has to remember strenuously all the moral beauty of the Parson's character in order to forgive the droning ugliness of his prose. Nothing could better realize the description which Tennyson's _Northern Farmer_ gives of _his_ parson's manner of preaching and the effect thereof: An' I hallus comed to t' choorch afoor my Sally wur deäd, An' 'eerd un a bummin' awaäy loike a buzzard-clock ower my yeäd; An' I niver knaw'd what a meäned, but I thowt a 'ad summut to saäy, An' I thowt a said what a owt to 'a said, an' I comed awaäy. It must be said, however, in justice to Chaucer, that he writes better prose than this when he really sets about telling a tale. What the Parson calls his "tale" turns out, to the huge disgust, I suspect, of several other pilgrims besides the host, to be nothing more than a homily or sermon, in which the propositions about penitence, with many minor heads and sub-divisions, are unsparingly developed to the bitter end. But in the _Tale of Melibœus_ his inimitable faculty of story-telling comes to his aid, and determines his sentences to a little more variety and picturesqueness, though the sententious still predominates. Here, for example, is a bit of dialogue between Melibœus and his wife, which I selected because, over and above its application here as early prose, we will find it particularly suggestive presently when we come to compare it with some dialogue in George Eliot's _Adam Bede_, where the conversation is very much upon the same topic. It seems that Melibœus, being still a young man, goes away into the fields, leaving his wife Prudence and his daughter--whose name some of the texts give in its Greek form as Sophia, while others, quaintly enough, call her Sapience, translating the Greek into Latin--in the house. Thereupon "three of his olde foos" (says Chaucer) "have it espyed, and setten laddres to the walles of his hous, and by the wyndowes ben entred, and beetyn his wyf, and wounded his daughter with fyve mortal woundes, in fyve sondry places, that is to sayn, in here feet, in her handes, in here eres, in her nose, and in here mouth; and lafte her for deed, and went away." Melibœus assembles a great counsel of his friends, and these advise him to make war, with an interminable dull succession of sententious maxims and quotations which would merely have maddened a modern person to such a degree that he would have incontinently levied war upon his friends as well as his enemies. But after awhile Dame Prudence modestly advises against the war. "This Melibœus answerde unto his wyf Prudence: 'I purpose not,' quod he, 'to werke by this counseil, for many causes and resouns; for certes every wight wolde holde me thanne a fool, this is to sayn, if I for thy counseil wolde chaunge things that affirmed ben by somany wise.