That wolde lyve parfytly;
But, lordyngs, by your leve, that am not I.
The bulk of us must live as the law of kind enjoins.
It is characteristic of Chaucer’s conception of the world, that the highest praise he can bestow on anything is to assert of it, that it possesses in the highest degree the qualities of its own particular kind. Thus of Cressida he says:
She was not with the least of her stature,
But all her limbes so well answering
Weren to womanhood, that creature
Nas never lesse mannish in seeming.
The horse of brass in the Squire’s Tale is
So well proportioned to be strong,