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 unmade.

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 well-known 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, 1381-eleven 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 night.

The waker goose, the cuckoo, ever unkind;

The popinjay, full of delicacy;

The drake, destroyer of his ownë 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 frostý fieldfáre.

Naturalists must be left to explain some of these epithets and designations, 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.

4 Than all the birdis song with sic a schout

That I annone awoik quhair that I lay.

DUNBAR, The Thrissill and the Rois.