Note 209 — Chapter VIII

A thirty or more years old example of this rejection returns to memory. A young man—a born soldier, and son to a distinguished officer in the Engineers—failed to pass the inevitable Army examination. The subject over which he broke down was some poem of Chaucer's, I think the immortal Prologue to The Canterbury Tales—that wonderful collection of masterly-drawn portraits of men and women who must have been living people over five hundred years ago. Even an ardent lover of him “whose sweet breath preluded those melodious bursts that fill the spacious times of great Elizabeth with sounds that echo still,” has never yet been able to perceive what connection the strains of “Dan Chaucer, the first warbler,” can have with the science of modern warfare. The born soldier, it was said, was fain to turn ranchman in the American Far West.