Lectures On The English Poets William Hazlitt

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In which ther wonneth neyther man ne best,
With knotty knarry barrein trees old
Of stubbes sharpe and hidous to behold;
In which ther ran a romble and a swough,
As though a storme shuld bresten every bough."
And again, among innumerable terrific images of death and slaughter
painted on the wall, is this one:
"The statue of Mars upon a carte stood
Armed, and looked grim as he were wood.
A wolf ther stood beforne him at his fete
With eyen red, and of a man he ete."
The story of Griselda is in Boccaccio; but the Clerk of Oxenforde,
who tells it, professes to have learned it from Petrarch. This story has
gone all over Europe, and has passed into a proverb. In spite of the
barbarity of the circumstances, which are abominable, the sentiment
remains unimpaired and unalterable. It is of that kind, "that heaves no
sigh, that sheds no tear"; but it hangs upon the beatings of the heart;
it is a part of the very being; it is as inseparable from it as the
breath we draw. It is still and calm as the face of death. Nothing can
touch it in its ethereal purity: tender as the yielding flower, it is
fixed as the marble firmament. The only remonstrance she makes, the only
complaint she utters against all the ill-treatment she receives, is that
single line where, when turned back naked to her father's house, she
says,
"Let me not like a worm go by the way."
The first outline given of the character is inimitable:
"Nought fer fro thilke paleis honourable,
Wher as this markis shope his marriage,
Ther stood a thorpe, of sighte delitable,
In which that poure folk of that village
Hadden hir bestes and her herbergage,
And of hir labour toke hir sustenance,
After that the erthe yave hem habundance.
Among this poure folk ther dwelt a man,