Both of one mind, as married people use, Quietly, quietly the evening through.
The sun goes down, a common greyness silvers everything; Epping Forest and the Hampstead heights stand dim against the afterglow. From beneath their very windows the long road stretches far into the fading landscape; men and cattle begin to straggle citywards, first slowly, and then with such haste as their weariness will permit, for the curfew begins to ring out from Bow steeple.[117] Chaucer himself has painted this twilight scene in "Troilus and Criseyde," written during this very Aldgate time. The hero watches all day long, with his friend Pandarus, at one of the gates of Troy, for had not Criseyde pledged her word to come back on that day at latest? Every creature crawling along the distant roads gives the lover fresh hopes and fresh heart-sickness; but it is sorest of all when the evening shadows leave most to the imagination--
The day go'th fast, and after that com'th eve And yet came not to Troilus Criseyde. He looketh forth by hedge, by tree, by greve, [grove And far his head over the wall he laid ... "Have here my truth, I see her! Yond she is! Have up thine eyen, man! May'st thou not see?" Pandarus answered, "Nay, so mote I the! All wrong, by God! What say'st thou, man? Where art? That I see yond is but a farë-cart." The warden of the gatës gan to call The folk which that without the gatës were, And bade them driven in their beastës all, Or all the night they musten bleven there; [remain And far within the night, with many a tear, This Troilus gan homeward for to ride, For well he seeth it helpeth nought t' abide.
And far within the night, while the "uncunning porters" sing over their liquor or snore on their pallets, Chaucer turns and returns the leaves of Virgil or Ovid, of Dante or the "Romance of the Rose." Does he not also, to poor Philippa's disgust, "laugh full fast" to himself sometimes over that witty and ungallant book of satires which contains "of wicked wives ... more legendës and lives than be of goodë wives in the Bible"? It is difficult to escape from this conviction. His "Wife of Bath" cites the treatises in question too fully and too well to make it probable that Chaucer wrote from mere memory. Remembering this probability, and the practical certainty that, like his contemporaries, Chaucer needed to read aloud for the full comprehension of what he had under his eyes, we shall then find nothing unexpected in his pretty plain allusions to reprisals. Sweet as honey in the mouth, his books proved sometimes bitter in the belly, like that of the Apocalypse. "Late to bed" suits ill with "early to rise," and the poet hints pretty plainly that an imperious and somewhat unsympathetic "Awake, Geoffrey!" was often the first word he heard in the morning. When the Golden Eagle caught the sleeping poet up to heaven--