passes on to a series of reflexions on the causes of the movement, conceived in a spirit of indignation against the corruptions of the Church, but not of sympathy with Wycliffism. This is no doubt the poem which obtained for Gower the epithet "moral" (i. e., sententious) applied to him by Chaucer, and afterwards by Dunbar, Hawes, and Shakspeare. Gower's Vox Clamantis and other Latin poems (including one "against the astuteness of the Evil One in the matter of Lollardry ") are forgotten; but his English Confessio Amantis has retained its right to a place of honour in the history of our literature. The most interesting part of this poem, its Prologue, has already been cited as of value for our knowledge of the political and social condition of its times. It gives expression to a conservative tone and temper of mind; and, like many conservative minds, Gower's had adopted, or affected to adopt, the conviction that the world was coming to an end. The cause of the anticipated catastrophe he found in the division, or absence of concord and love, manifest in the condition of things around. The intensity of strife visible among the conflicting elements of which the world, like the individual human being, is composed, too clearly announced the imminent end of all things. Would that a new Arion might arise to make peace where now is hate; but, alas! the prevailing confusion is such that God alone may set it right. But the poem which follows cannot be said to sustain the interest excited by this introduction. Its machinery was obviously suggested by that of the Roman de la Rose, though, as Warton has happily phrased it, Gower, after a fashion of his own, blends Ovid's Art of Love with the Breviary. The poet, wandering about in a forest, while suffering under the smart of Cupid's dart, meets Venus, the Goddess of Love, who urges him, as one upon the point of death, to make his full confession to her clerk or priest, the holy father Genius. confession hereupon takes place by means of question and answer; both penitent and confessor entering at great length into an examination of the various sins and weaknesses of human nature, and of their remedies, and illustrating their observations by narratives, brief or elaborate, from Holy Writ, sacred legend, ancient history, and romantic story. Thus Gower's book, as he says at its close, stands "between earnest and game," and might be fairly described as a Romaunt of the Rose, without either the descriptive grace of Guillaume de Lorris, or the wicked wit of Jean de Meung, but full of learning and matter, and written by an author certainly not devoid of the art of telling stories. The mind of this author was thoroughly didactic in its bent; for the beauty of nature he has no real feeling; and though his poem, like so many of Chaucer's, begins in the month of May, he is (unnecessarily) careful to tell us that his object in going forth was not to "sing with the birds." He could not, like Chaucer, transfuse old things into new, but there is enough in his character as a poet to explain the friendship between the pair, of which we hear at the very time when Gower was probably preparing his Confessio Amantis for publication.

This

They are said afterwards to have become enemies; but in the

absence of any real evidence to that effect, we cannot believe Chaucer to have been likely to quarrel with one whom he had certainly both trusted and admired. Nor had literary life in England already advanced to a stage of development of which, as in the Elizabethan and Augustan ages,literary jealousy was an indispensable accompaniment. Chaucer is supposed to have attacked Gower in a passage of the Canterbury Tales, where he incidentally declares his dislike (in itself extremely commendable) of a particular kind of sensational stories, instancing the subject of one of the numerous tales in the Confessio Amantis. There is, however, no reason whatever for supposing Chaucer to have here intended a reflection on his brother poet, more especially as the Man of Law, after uttering the censure, relates, though probably not from Gower, a story on a subject of a different kind likewise treated by him. It is scarcely more suspicious that when Gower, in a second edition of his chief work, dedicated in 1393 to Henry, Earl of Derby (afterwards Henry IV.), judiciously omitted the exordium and altered the close of the first edition-both of which were complimentary to Richard II.—he left out, together with its surrounding context, a passage conveying a friendly challenge to Chaucer as a disciple and poet of the God of Love."

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In any case there could have been no political difference between them, for Chaucer was at all times in favour with the House of Lancaster, towards whose future head Gower so early contrived to assume a correct attitude. To him-a man of substance, with landed property in three counties-the rays of immediate courtfavour were probably of less importance than to Chaucer; but it is not necessity only which makes courtiers of so many of us: some are born to the vocation, and Gower strikes one as naturally more prudent and cautious-in short, more of a politic personage-than Chaucer. He survived him eight years-a blind invalid, in whose mind at least we may hope nothing dimmed or blurred the recollection of a friend to whom he owes much of his fame.

In a still nearer relationship-on which the works of Chaucer that may certainly or probably be assigned to this period throw some light-it seems impossible to describe him as having been fortunate. Whatever may have been the date and circumstances of his marriage, it seems, at all events in its later years, not to have been a happy one. The allusions to Chaucer's personal experience of married life in both Troilus and Cressid and the House of Fame are not of a kind to be entirely explicable by that tendency to make a mock of women and of marriage, which has frequently been characteristic of satirists, and which was specially popular in an age cherishing the wit of Jean de Meung, and complacently corroborating its theories from naughty Latin fables, French fabliaux, and Italian novelle. Both in Troilus and Cressid and in the House of Fame the poet's tone, when he refers to himself, is generally dolorous; but while both poems contain unmistakeable references to the joylessness of his own married life, in the latter he speaks of himself as "suffering

debonairly ❞—or, as we should say, putting a good face upon-a state" desperate of all bliss." And it is a melancholy though half sarcastic glimpse into his domestic privacy which he incidentally, and it must be allowed rather unnecessarily, gives in the following passage of the same poem :

"Awake!' to me he said,

In voice and tone the very same
That useth one whom I could name;
And with that voice, sooth to say (n)
My mind returned to me again;
For it was goodly said to me;

So was it never wont to be."

In other words, the kindness of the voice reassured him that it was not the same as that which he was wont to hear close to his pillow! Again, the entire tone of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women is not that of a happy lover; although it would be pleasant enough, considering that the lady who imposes on the poet the penalty of celebrating good women is Alcestis, the type of faithful wifehood, to interpret the poem as not only an amende honorable to the female sex in general, but a token of reconciliation to the poet's wife in particular. Even in the joyous Assembly of Fowls, a marriage-poem, the same discord already makes itself heard; for it cannot be without meaning that in his dream the poet is told by "African ”

"... Thou of love hast lost thy taste, I guess,
As sick men have of sweet and bitterness;

and that he confesses for himself that, though he has read much of love, he knows not of it by experience. While, however, we reluctantly accept the conclusion that Chaucer was unhappy as a husband, we must at the same time decline, because the husband was a poet, and one of the most genial of poets, to cast all the blame upon the wife, and to write her down a shrew. It is unfortunate, no doubt, but it is likewise inevitable, that at so great a distance of time the rights and wrongs of a conjugal disagreement or estrangement cannot with safety be adjusted. Yet again, because we refuse to blame Philippa, we are not obliged to blame Chaucer. At the same time, it must not be concealed that his name occurs in the year 1380 in connexion with a legal process, of which the most obvious, though not the only possible, explanation is that he had been guilty of a grave infidelity towards his wife. Such discoveries as this last we might be excused for wishing un

made.

Considerable uncertainty remains with regard to the dates of the poems belonging to this seemingly, in all respects but one fortunate period of Chaucer's life. Of one of these works, however, which has had the curious fate to be dated and re-dated by a succession of happy conjectures, the last and happiest of all may

be held to have definitively fixed the occasion. This is the charming poem called the Assembly of Fowls, or Parliament of Birds-a production which seems so English, so fresh from nature's own inspiration, so instinct with the gaiety of Chaucer's own heart, that one is apt to overlook in it the undeniable vestiges of foreign influences, both French and Italian. At its close the poet confesses that he is always reading, and therefore hopes that he may at last read something "so to fare the better." But with all this evidence of study the Assembly of Fowls is chiefly interesting as showing how Chaucer had now begun to select as well as to assimilate his loans; how, while he was still moving along wellknown tracks, his eyes were joyously glancing to the right and the left; and how the source of most of his imagery, at all events, he already found in the merry England around him, even as he had chosen for his subject one of real national interest.

Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the great Emperor Charles IV., and sister of King Wenceslas, had been successively betrothed to a Bavarian prince and to a Margrave of Meissen, before-after negotiations which, according to Froissart, lasted a year-her hand was given to the young King Richard II. of England. This sufficiently explains the general scope of the Assembly of Fowls, an allegorical poem written on or about St. Valentine's Day, 1381eleven months, or nearly a year, after which date the marriage took place. On the morning sacred to lovers, the poet (in a dream, of course, and this time conducted by the arch-dreamer Scipio in person) enters a garden containing in it the temple of the God of Love, and filled with inhabitants mythological and allegorical. Here he sees the noble goddess Nature, seated upon a hill of flowers, and around her "all the fowls that be," assembled as by time-honoured custom on St. Valentine's Day, "when every fowl comes there to choose her mate." Their huge noise and hubbub is reduced to order by Nature, who assigns to each fowl its proper place-the birds of prey highest; then those that eat according to natural inclination

"Worm or thing of which I tell no tale;"

then those that live by seed; and the various members of the several classes are indicated with amusing vivacity and point, from the royal eagle "that with his sharp look pierceth the sun," and "other eagles of a lower kind downwards. We can only find

room for a portion of the company :—

"The sparrow, Venus' son; the nightingale
That clepeth forth the freshë leaves new;
The swallow, murd'rer of the beës small,
That honey make of flowers fresh of hue;
The wedded turtle, with his heartë true;
The peacock, with his angels' feathers bright,
The pheasant, scorner of the cock by nigh..

The waker goose, the cuckoo, ever unkind;
The popinjay, full of delicacy;

The drake, destroyer of his owné kind;

The stork, avenger of adultery;

The cormorant, hot and full of gluttony;

The crows and ravens with their voice of care;
And the throstle old, and the frosty fieldfáre."

Naturalists must be left to explain some of these epithets and des ignations, not all of which rest on allusions as easily understood as that recalling the goose's exploit on the Capitol; but the vivacity of the whole description speaks for itself. One is reminded of Aristophanes' feathered chorus; but birds are naturally the delight of poets, and were befriended by Dante himself.

Hereupon the action of the poem opens. A female eagle is wooed by three suitors-all eagles; but among them the first, or royal eagle, discourses in the manner most likely to conciliate favour. Before the answer is given, a pause furnishes an opportunity to the other fowls for delighting in the sound of their own voices, Dame Nature proposing that each class of birds shall, through the beak of its representative "agitator," express its opinion on the problem before the assembly. There is much humour in the readiness of the goose to rush in with a ready-made resolution, and in the smart reproof administered by the sparrow-hawk amidst the uproar of "the gentle fowls all." At last Nature silences the tumult, and the lady-eagle delivers her answer, to the effect that she cannot make up her mind for a year to come; but inasmuch as Nature has advised her to choose the royal eagle, his is clearly the most favourable prospect. Whereupon, after certain fowls had sung a roundel, "as was always the usance," the assembly, like some human Parliaments, breaks up with shouting; * and the dreamer awakes to resume his reading.

Very possibly the Assembly of Fowls was at no great interval of time after followed or preceded by two poems of far inferior interest-the Complaint of Mars (apparently afterwards amalgamated with that of Venus), which is supposed to be sung by a bird on St. Valentine's morning, and the fragment Of Queen Anelida and false Arcite. There are, however, reasons which make a less early date probable in the case of the latter production, the history of the origin and purpose of which can hardly be said as yet to be removed out of the region of mere speculation. In any case, neither of these poems can be looked upon as preparations, on Chaucer's part, for the longer work on which he was to expend so much labour; but in a sense this description would apply to the translation which, probably before he wrote Troilus and Cressid, certainly before he wrote the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, he made of the famous Latin work of Boëthius, "the just man in prison," on the Consolation of Philosophy. This book was, "Than all the birdis song with sic a schout That I annone awoik quhair that I lay."

DUNBAR, The Thrissill and the Rois.