Look on the wide expanse of swelling downs over-arched by the tragic splendour of an evening sky. Here the thought, as ever with Blake, is lifted up above the accidents, into the eternal and the infinite. But Stothard's gentle hills and bowery trees shut out such vistas, and he concerns himself scarcely at all about the sky, which is merely the background on which to throw up the graceful heads of his graceful unintelligent folk.
The characteristic group of children with their mother and grandfather, which Blake has set beside the gateway of the Tabard Inn, has great beauty as a single motive. No labour has been spared to make all faithful to the Chaucerian conception: the curious semi-Gothic gateway, the crowding pigeons, the barbaric splendours of the wife of Bath, the mediaeval figure of the knight, whose face reminds one somewhat of the supposed portrait of Cimabue in the Chapel of the Spaniards in Santa Maria Novella; all have been wrought with painful care. The work is an illustration of Blake's principle enunciated in his notes on Reynolds' "Discourses" and elsewhere that "Real effect is making out of parts, and it is nothing else but that."
Perhaps the strangest trait the engraving exhibits in comparison with Stothard's is that it looks so antique. It might have been executed a hundred years earlier than the other picture, so wilfully grotesque and archaic is it. Yes, _wilfully_ is the word, for Blake _wished_ to make his procession as stiff and quaint and rich as the stately Chaucerian language that first painted the scene, forgetting perhaps that the two arts of poetry and painting achieve the same end through widely different conditions, and according to processes contiguous, but non-interchangeable. The want of ease, of careless and familiar naturalism in the engraving, may recall to those who look for it the splendid and ceremonious language of the old story-teller. The description written by Blake of his own design (it will be found in Gilchrist) shows how he loved and understood Chaucer, and, we may add, how very loosely the poem was grasped, and with what want of truth to the original it was represented by his rival. Lamb said of the engraving itself that it was "a work of wonderful power and spirit, hard and dry, yet with grace," and the Descriptive Catalogue--a copy of which was given him by Crabb Robinson--pleased him greatly; the part devoted to an analysis of the characters in the "Canterbury Pilgrimage" he found to be "the finest criticism of Chaucer's poem he had ever read."