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courtier seemed the perfection of the idea of gentleman. At the same time, exaggerated conceptions of the courtly breeding of Chaucer's and Froissart's age may very easily be formed; and it is almost amusing to contrast with Chaucer's generally liberal notions of manners, severe views of etiquette like that introduced by him at the close of the Man of Law's Tale, where he stigmatises as a solecism the statement of the author from whom he copied his narrative, that King Ella sent his little boy to invite the emperor to dinner. "It is best to deem he went himself."

The position which in June, 1367, we find Chaucer holding at Court is that of "Valettus" to the King, or, as a later document of May, 1368, has it, of "Valettus Cameræ Regis "-Valet or Yeoman of the King's Chamber. Posts of this kind, which involved the ordinary functions of personal attendance—the making of beds, the holding of torches, the laying of tables, the going on messages, etc.-were usually bestowed upon young men of good family. In due course of time a royal valet usually rose to the higher post of royal squire either "of the household" generally, or of a more special kind. Chaucer appears in 1368 as an "esquire of less degree," his name standing seventeenth in a list of seven-and-thirty. After the year 1373 he is never mentioned by the lower, but several times by Latin equivalents of the higher, title. Frequent entries occur of the pension or salary of twenty marks granted to him for life; and, as will be seen, he soon began to be employed on missions abroad. He had thus become a regular member of the royal establishment, within the sphere of which we must suppose the associations of the next years of his life to have been confined. They belonged to a period of peculiar significance both for the English people and for the Plantagenet dynasty, whose glittering exploits reflected so much transitory glory on the national arms. At home, these years were the brief interval between two of the chief visitations of the Black Death (1361 and 1369); and a few years earlier the poet of the Vision had given voice to the sufferings of the poor. It was not, however, the mothers of the people crying for their children whom the courtly singer remembered in his elegy written in the year 1369; the woe to which he gave a poetic expression was that of a princely widower temporarily inconsolable for the loss of his first wife. In 1367 the Black Prince was conquering Castile (to be lost again before the year was out) for that interesting protégé of the Plantagenets and representative of legitimate right, Don Pedro the Cruel, whose daughter the inconsolable widower was to espouse in 1372, and whose "tragic" downfall Chaucer afterwards duly lamented in his Monk's Tale:

"O noble, O worthy Pedro, glory of Spain,
Whom fortune held so high in majesty !

As yet the star of the valiant Prince of Wales had not been uenched in the sickness which was the harbinger of death; and his younger brother, John of Gaunt, though already known for his bravery in the field (he commanded the reinforcements sent to

Spain in 1367), had scarcely begun to play the prominent part in politics which he was afterwards to fill. But his day was at hand, and the anticlerical tenour of the legislation and of the administrative changes of these years was in entire harmony with the policy of which he was to constitute himself the representative. 1365 is the year of the Statute of Provisors, and 1371 that of the dismissal of William of Wykeham.

John of Gaunt was born in 1340, and was, therefore, probably of much the same age as Chaucer, and, like him, now in the prime of life. Nothing could, accordingly, be more natural than that a more or less intimate relation should have formed itself between them. This relation, there is reason to believe, afterwards ripened, on Chaucer's part, into one of distinct political partisanship, of which there could as yet (for the reason given above) hardly be a question. There was, however, so far as we know, nothing in Chaucer's tastes and tendencies to render it antecedently unlikely that he should have been ready to follow the fortunes of a prince who entered the political arena as an adversary of clerical predominance. Had Chaucer been a friend of it in principle, he would hardly have devoted his first efforts as a writer to the translation of the Roman de la Rose. In so far, therefore—and in truth it is not very faras John of Gaunt may be afterwards said to have been a Wycliffite, the same description might probably be applied to Chaucer. With such sentiments a personal orthodoxy was fully reconcileable in both patron and follower; and the so-called Chaucer's A.B.C., a version of a prayer to the Virgin in a French poetical "Pilgrimage," might with equal probability have been put together by him either early or late in the course of his life. There was, however, a tradition, repeated by Speght, that this piece was composed" at the request of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, as a prayer for her private use, being a woman in her religion very devout." If so, it must have been written before the Duchess's death, which occurred in 1369; and we may imagine it, if we please, with its twenty-three initial letters blazoned in red and blue and gold on a flyleaf inserted in the Book of the pious Duchess-herself, in the fervent language of the poem, an illuminated calendar, as being lighted in this world with the Virgin's holy name.

In the autumn of 1369, then, the Duchess Blanche died an early death; and it is pleasing to know that John of Gaunt, to whom his marriage with her had brought wealth and a dukedom, ordered services in pious remembrance of her, to be held at her grave. The elaborate elegy which-very possibly at the widowed Duke's request -was composed by Chaucer, leaves no doubt as to the identity of the lady whose loss it deplores :

Goode faire White she hight;
Thus was my lady named right;
For she was both fair and bright."

But in accordance with the taste of his age, which shunned such sheer straightforwardness in poetry, the Book of the Duchess con

tains no further transparent reference to the actual circumstances of the wedded life which had come to so premature an end-for John of Gaunt had married Blanche of Lancaster in 1359-and an elaborate framework is constructed round the essential theme of the poem. Already, however, the instinct of Chaucer's own poetic genius had taught him the value of personal directness; and, artificially as the course of the poem is arranged, it begins in the most artless and effective fashion with an account given by the poet of his own sleeplessness and its cause, already referred to-an opening so felicitous that it was afterwards imitated by Froissart. And so, Chaucer continues, as he could not sleep, to drive the night away he sat upright in his bed reading a " romance," which he thought better entertainment than chess or draughts. The book which he read was the Metamorphoses of Ovid; and in it he chanced on the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone-the lovers whom, on their premature death, the compassion of Juno changed into the sea-birds that bring good-luck to mariners. Of this story (whether Chaucer derived it direct from Ovid, or from Machault's French version, is disputed), the earlier part serves as the introduction to the poem. The story breaks off-with the dramatic abruptness in which Chaucer is a master, and which so often distinguishes his versions from their originals-at the death of Alcyone, caused by her grief at the tidings brought by Morpheus of her husband's death. Thus subtly the god of sleep and the death of a loving wife mingle their images in the poet's mind; and with these upon him, he falls asleep right upon his book."

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What more natural, after this, than the dream which came to him? It was May, and he lay in his bed at morning-time, having been awakened out of his slumbers by the "small fowls," who were carolling forth their notes-" some high, some low, and all of one accord." The birds singing their matins around the poet, and the sun shining brightly through his windows stained with many a figure of poetic legend, and upon the walls painted in fine colours, "both text and gloss, and all the Rómaunt of the Rose "-is not this a picture of Chaucer by his own hand, on which one may love to dwell? And just as the poem has begun with a touch of nature, and at the beginning of its main action has returned to nature, so through the whole of its course it maintains the same tone. The sleeper awakened-still, of course, in his dream-hears the sound of the horn, and the noise of huntsmen preparing for the chase. He rises, saddles his horse, and follows to the forest, where the Emperor Octavian (a favourite character of Carolingian legend, and pleasantly revived under this aspect by the modern romanticist, Ludwig Tieck-in Chaucer's poem probably a flattering allegory for the King) is holding his hunt. The deer having been started, the poet is watching the course of the hunt, when he is approached by a dog, which leads him to a solitary spot in a thicket among mighty trees; and here of a sudden he comes upon a man in black, sitting silently by the side of a huge oak. How simple and how charming is the device of the faithful dog acting as a

guide into the mournful solitude of the faithful man! For the knight whom the poet finds thus silent and alone, is rehearsing to himself a lay," a manner song," in these words :

Seeing the knight overcome by his grief, and on the point of fainting, the poet accosts him, and courteously demands his pardon for the intrusion. Thereupon the disconsolate mourner, touched by this token of sympathy, breaks out into the tale of his sorrow which forms the real subject of the poem. It is a lament for the loss of a wife who was hard to gain (the historical basis of this is unknown, but great heiresses are usually hard to gain for cadets even of royal houses), and whom, alas! her husband was to lose so soon after he had gained her. Nothing could be simpler, and nothing could be more delightful, than the Black Knight's description of his lost lady as she was at the time when he wooed and almost despaired of winning her. Many of the touches in this descriptionand among them some of the very happiest-are, it is true, borrowed from the courtly Machault; but nowhere has Chaucer been happier, both in his appropriations and in the way in which he has really converted them into beauties of his own, than in this, perhaps the most lifelike picture of maidenhood in the whole range of our literature. Or is not the following the portrait of an English girl, all life and all innocence--a type not belonging, like its opposite, to any "period" in particular?

"I saw her dance so comelily,
Carol and sing so sweetely,
And laugh, and play so womanly,
And looke so debonairly,

So goodly speak and so friendly,

That, certes, I trow that nevermore
Was seen so blissful a treasure.
For every hair upon her head,
Sooth to say, it was not red,

Nor yellow neither, nor brown it was,
Methought most like gold it was.
And ah! what eyes my lady had,
Debonair, goodë, glad and sad,
Simple, of good size, not too wide.
Thereto her look was not aside
Nor overthwart ;"

but so well set that whoever beheld her was drawn and taken up by it, every part of him. Her eyes seemed every now and then as if she were inclined to be merciful, such was the delusion of fools: a delusion in very truth, for

"It was no counterfeited thing;
It was her ownë pure looking;
So the goddess, dame Natúre,
Had made them open by measure
And close; for were she never so glad,
Not foolishly her looks were spread,
Nor wildely, though that she play'd;

But ever, methought, her eyen said,
'By God, my wrath is all forgiven.'

And at the same time she liked to live so happily that dulness was afraid of her she was neither too "sober" nor too glad; in short, no creature had ever more measure in all things. Such was the lady whom the knight had won for himself, and whose virtues he cannot weary of rehearsing to himself or to a sympathising auditor.

And with that word, the hunt breaking up, the knight and the poet depart to a "long castle with white walls on a rich hill" (Richmond?), where a bell tolls and awakens the poet from his slumbers, to let him find himself lying in his bed, and the book, with its legend of love and sleep, resting in his hand. One hardly knows at whom more to wonder--whether at the distinguished French scholar who sees so many trees that he cannot see a forest, and who, not content with declaring the Book of the Duchess, as a whole as well as in its details, a servile imitation of Machault, pronounces it at the same time one of Chaucer's feeblest productions; or at the equally eminent English scholar who, with a flippancy which for once ceases to be amusing, opines that Chaucer ought to "have felt ashamed of himself for this most lame and impotent a conclusion" of a poem "full of beauties," and ought to have been "caned for it!" Not only was this "lame and impotent conclusion " imitated by Spenser in his lovely elegy, Daph