Page:The common reader.djvu/35

 immense variety in the Canterbury Tales, and yet, persisting underneath, one consistent type. Chaucer has his world; he has his young men; he has his young women. If one met them straying in Shakespeare’s world one would know them to be Chaucer’s, not Shakespeare’s. He wants to describe a girl, and this is what she looks like:

Then he goes on to develop her; she was a girl, a virgin, cold in her virginity:

Next he bethinks him how

Each of these quotations, in fact, comes from a different Tale, but they are parts, one feels, of the same