text:  In the matchless original all the night's action goes on in one room--and that not a large one--miller miller's wife miller's daughter and the two strenuous Cantabs are within the same four narrow walls--their beds nearly touch--the jeopardized cradle has just space to rock in--yet this self-elected expositor of Chaucer is either so blind as not to see how essential such allocation of the parties is to the wicked comedy or such a blunderer as to believe that he can improve on the greatest master that ever dared and with perfect success to picture without our condemnation--so wide is the privilege of genius in sportive fancy--what but for the self-rectifying spirit of fiction would have been an outrage on nature and in the number not only of forbidden but unhallowed things