district, the Wife of Bath, makes the most of her oppor tunities to be seen as well as to see. Her "kerchiefs " were "full fine" of texture, and weighed, one might be sworn, ten pound

That on a Sunday were upon her head.

Her hosen too were of fine scarlet red,

Full straight y-tied, and shoes full moist and new.

Upon an ambler easily she sat,

Y-wimpled well, and on her head a hat,

As broad as is a buckler or a targe.

So, with a foot-mantle round her hips, and a pair of sharp spurs on her feet, she looked as defiant as any selfconscious Amazon of any period. It might perhaps be shown how in more important artistic efforts than fashions of dress this age displayed its aversion from simplicity and moderation. At all events, the love of the florid and overloaded declares itself in what we know concerning the social life of the nobility, as, for instance, we find that life reflected in the pages of Froissart, whose counts and lords seem neither to clothe themselves nor to feed themselves, nor to talk, pray, or swear like ordinary mortals. The Vows of the Heron, a poem of the earlier part of King Edward III.'s reign, contains a choice collection of strenuous knightly oaths; and in a humbler way the rest of the population very naturally imitated the parlance of their rulers, and in the words of the Parson's Tale, "dismembered Christ by soul, heart, bones, and body."

But there is one very much more important feature to be noticed in the social life of the nobility, for whom Chaucer's poetry must have largely replaced the French verse in which they had formerly delighted. The relation between knight and lady plays a great part in the history

as well as in the literature of the later Plantagenet period; and incontestably its conceptions of this relation still retained much of the pure sentiment belonging to the best and most fervent times of Christian chivalry. The highest religious expression which has ever been given to man's sense of woman's mission, as his life's comfort and crown, was still a universally dominant belief. To the Blessed Virgin, King Edward III. dedicated his principal religious foundation; and Chaucer, to whatever extent his opinions or sentiments may have been in accordance with ideas of ecclesiastical reform, displays a pious devotion towards the foremost Saint of the Church. The lyric entitled the Praise of Women, in which she is enthusiastically recognized as the representative of the whole of her sex, is generally rejected as not Chaucer's; but the elaborate "Orison to the Holy Virgin," beginning

Mother of God, and Virgin undefiled,

seems to be correctly described as Oratio Gallfridi Chaucer; and in Chaucer's A. B. C., called La Prière de Notre Dame, a translation by him from a French original, we have a long address to the Blessed Virgin in twenty-three stanzas, each of which begins with one of the letters of the alphabet arranged in proper succession. Nor, apart from this religious sentiment, had men yet altogether lost sight of the ideal of true knightly love, destined though this ideal was to be obscured in the course of time, until at last the Mort d'Arthure was the favourite literary nourishment of the minions and mistresses of Edward IV.'s degenerate days. In his Book of the Duchess Chaucer has left us a picture of true knightly love, together with one of true maiden purity. The lady celebrated in this poem was loth, merely for the sake of coquetting

with their exploits, to send her knights upon errands of chivalry

into Walachy,

To Prussia, and to Tartary,
To Alexandria or Turkey.

And doubtless there was many a gentle knight or squire to whom might have been applied the description given by the heroine of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressid of her lover, and of that which attracted her in him :

For trust ye well that your estate royál,
Nor vain delight, nor only worthiness
Of you in war or tourney martial,
Nor pomp, array, nobility, richés,

:

Of these none made me rue on your distress;
But moral virtue, grounded upon truth,
That was the cause I first had on you ruth.

And gentle heart, and manhood that ye had,
And that ye had (as méthought) in despite
Everything that tended unto bad,
As rudeness, and as popular appetite,
And that your reason bridled your delight,
'Twas these did make 'bove every creatúre
That I was yours, and shall while I may 'dure.

And if true affection under the law still secured the sympathy of the better-balanced part of society, so the vice of those who made war upon female virtue, or the insolence of those who falsely boasted of their conquests, still incurred its resentment. Among the companies which in the House of Fame sought the favour of its mistress, Chaucer vigorously satirises the would-be-lady-killers, who were content with the reputation of accomplished seducers; and in Troilus and Cressid a shrewd observer exclaims with the utmost vivacity against

Such sort of folk,-what shall I clepe them? what?
That vaunt themselves of women, and by name,
That yet to them ne'er promised this or that,

Nor knew them more, in sooth, than mine old hat.

The same easy but sagacious philosopher (Pandarus) observes, that the harm which is in this world springs as often from folly as from malice. But a deeper feeling animates the lament of the "good Alceste," in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, that among men the betrayal of women is now "held a game." So indisputably it was already often esteemed, in too close an accordance with examples set in the highest places in the land. If we are to credit an old tradition, a poem in which Chaucer narrates the amours of Mars and Venus was written by him at the request of John of Gaunt, to celebrate the adultery of the duke's sister-in-law with a nobleman, to whom the injured kinsman afterwards married one of his own daughters! But nowhere was the deterioration of sentiment on this head more strongly typified than in Edward III. himself. The King, who (if the pleasing tale be true which gave rise to some beautiful scenes in an old English drama) had in his early days royally renounced an unlawful passion for the fair Countess of Salisbury, came to be accused of at once violating his conjugal duty and neglecting his military glory for the sake of strange women's charms. The founder of the Order of the Garter -the device of which enjoined purity even of thought as a principle of conduct-died in the hands of a rapacious courtesan. Thus, in England, as in France, the ascendancy is gained by ignobler views concerning the relation between the sexes,- -a relation to which the whole system of chivalry owed a great part of its vitality, and on the view of which prevailing in the most influential class of

any nation, the social health of that nation must inevitably in no small measure depend. Meanwhile, the artificialities by means of which in France, up to the beginning of the fifteenth century, it was sought to keep alive an organised system of sentimentality in the social dealings between gentlemen and ladies, likewise found admission in England, but only in a modified degree. Here the fashion in question asserted itself only, or chiefly, in our poetic literature, and in the adoption by it of such fancies as the praise and worship of the daisy, with which we meet in the Prologue to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, and in the Flower and the Leaf, a most pleasing poem (suggested by a French model), which it is unfortunately no longer possible to number among his genuine works. The poem of the Court of Love, which was likewise long erroneously attributed to him, may be the original work of an English author; but in any case its main contents are a mere adaptation of a peculiar outgrowth on a foreign soil of conceptions common to chivalry in general,

Of another force, which in the Middle Ages shared with chivalry (though not with it alone) the empire over the minds of men, it would certainly be rash to assert that its day was passing away in the latter half of the fourteenth century. It has indeed been pointed out that the date at which Wyclif's career as a reformer may be said to have begun almost coincides with that of the climax and first decline of feudal chivalry in England. But, without seeking to interpret coincidences, we know that, though the influence of the Christian Church and that of its Roman branch in particular, has asserted and re-asserted itself in various ways and degrees in various ages, yet in England, as elsewhere, the epoch