In the opening of this poem Chaucer represents himself as reading with delight a beautiful fragment of the sixth book of Cicero "On the Republic," which contains the doctrine of the soul's immortality in "The Dream of Scipio" ("Somnium Scipionis"). To this fragment a wide influence was given among educated readers of the middle ages, an influence which even Dante felt. It may be named as the work which, next to "The Romaunt of the Rose," had chief influence in determining a fashion of court literature for allegorical incidents in form of dream. We find the fashion illustrated in

The Assembly of Foules," and other of the earlier works of Chaucer, and in the literature of succeeding time, until the great development of new thought and new forms of writing in the days of Queen Elizabeth.

In telling the dream which forms the story of "The Assembly of Foules," Chaucer shows, as in "The Court of Love," the enjoyment with which he had then received the narrative poems of Boccaccio. Sixteen stanzas of the "Teseide," which describe, Cupid at a fountain tempering his arrows, and the crouched Venus herself, are translated in sixteen stanzas of "The Assembly of Foules," and they are translated in a way that places beyond question Chaucer's knowledge of Italian. The turns of phrase make it quite evident that Chaucer wrote with the Italian original before him.

9. Chaucer's "Complaint of the Black Knight," which is also written in Chaucer's stanza, professes to record what the poet heard of the complaint of a knight whom false tongues had hindered of his lady's grace; and the poem, probably, was designed for John of Gaunt to present to his lady on occasion of some small misunderstanding incident to days of courtship. It is a court poem of French pattern, thoroughly conventional, expressing unreal agonies by the accepted formulas; and in it the natural genius of Chaucer appears only in some touches at the close.

10. Chaucer's great patron, John of Gaunt, was married in May, 1359; and, five months afterward, Chaucer himself was in the army which Edward III. then led against France; first laying unsuccessful siege to Rheims; next advancing on Paris, and burning its suburbs; and then suffering famine so severe, that the English host was compelled to retreat towards Brit

tany, leaving a track of dead upon its way. It was in Brittany that Chaucer was taken prisoner by the French; and as peace was signed in May, 1360, it is supposed, that, unless ransomed before that time, he was then released. This, however, is only conjecture; and nothing is known of Chaucer's life for the next seven years. At the end of that time, in 1367, when he was thirty-nine years old, he was still attached to the king's household, and he received in that year a salary of twenty marks for life, or until he should be otherwise provided for, in consideration of his former and future services.

11. It was probably about this time that Chaucer married Philippa Roet, one of the ladies in attendance on the queen, eldest daughter of Sir Payne Roet, and sister of Katherine, third wife of John of Gaunt. To this time, therefore, may be assigned, with some probability, the exquisite poem known as "Chaucer's Dream."

Throughout this poem there is a delicate play of fairy fancy. It is in the light octosyllabic rhyme, which came in almost with the first English poems written after the Conquest, telling how the poet found himself, in dream, the only man in a marvellous island of fair ladies, whose queen was gone over the sea to a far rock to pluck three magic apples, upon which their bliss and well-being depended. But she returned, and with her came the Poet's Lady, by whom the Queen of that Isle of Pleasaunce had found herself forestalled. The Poet's Lady had been found already on the far rock, with the magic apples in her hand. A Knight also had there claimed the unlucky Queen as his; but the Poet's Lady had comforted her, had graciously put into her hand one of the apples, and had brought in her own ship both Queen and Knight home to the pleasant island. There its fair ladies all knelt to the Poet's Lady. The Knight would have died of the Queen's rigor if she had not revived him by some acts of kindness, after which she was resolved to bid him go. But then there were seen sailing to that island ten thousand ships; and the God of Love himself made all resistance vain. Many knights landed; and the Queen of the Isle, being overcome, presented to the Lord of Love a bill declaring her submission. The God of Love also paid homage to the Poet's Lady, and, himself pleading to her the Poet's cause, laughed as he told her his name. At last, after a multitude of marvellous incidents, there was a marriage-festival; and all, except the Poet, had been thus happily married, when, during a whole day, they besought of the Poet's Lady grace for him also. She yielded, and their marriage was to be that night. Then the happy Poet was led into a great tent that served for church, and there was solemn service, with rejoicing afterwards, of

which the loud sound woke him from his dream. He was alone then, in the old forest lodge, where he had slept, and was left in grief to pray that his Lady would give substance to his dreaming, or that he might go back into his dream and always serve her in the Isle of Pleasaunce. He ended his verse with a balade, bidding his innocent heart go forth to her who may "give thee the bliss that thou desirest oft."

12. We suppose Chaucer's marriage to have been about the year 1367. It was two years afterward, in September, 1369, that his illustrious patron lost his wife, the Duchess Blanche, in the courtship of whom, eleven years before, Chaucer's poems, "Assembly of Foules " and "Complaint of the Black Knight,” are believed to have assisted. So the devoted poet mourns her death in his "Book of the Duchess," a court poem in eightsyllabled rhyming verse, with the customary dream, May morning, and so forth, the romance figure of Emperor Octavian, from the tale of Charlemagne, and a chess play, with Fortune imitated, almost translated, from a favorite passage of "Le Roman de la Rose." Thus far a follower of the court fashions, Chaucer is in this poem himself a celebrater of that home delight of love over which Alcestis was queen under Venus. It is faithful wedded love that the "Book of the Duchess" We have here also the individual portrait of a gentlewoman who had been the poet's friend, and in whom he had seen a pattern of pure womanly grace and wifely worth. The Duchess Blanche left one son, about three years old, who became King Henry IV. To him, in his childhood, Chaucer must have been familiar as his father's household friend, and, doubtless, often welcome as a playfellow.

13. In the spring and summer of 1370 Chaucer was abroad on the king's service; and again, in November, 1372, being henceforth entitled an esquire, was made one of a commission that was to proceed to Italy, and treat with the duke, citizens, and merchants of Genoa for the choice of some port on the English coast at which the Genoese might establish a commercial factory. Upon such business he was in Italy, both at Florence and Genoa, in the year 1373. This was a year before the death of Petrarch, the year, also, in which Petrarch wrote that moralized Latin version of Boccaccio's tale of Griselda, which was afterwards followed by Chaucer in his "Clerk's

Tale," and of which he made his Clerk say that it was "learned at Padua of a worthy clerk, .. Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet." Chaucer is likely to have sought speech with so great a master of his art. He might also, during this visit to Italy, have spoken with Boccaccio, then living at Venice, and within but two years of his death; for Petrarch died in 1374, Boccaccio in 1375. Our own poet was home again at the close of November, 1373, and was paid for his service and expenses ninety-two pounds, which would be worth more than nine hundred pounds in present value. In April of the next year, 1374, on St. George's Day, a grant was made to Chaucer of a daily pitcher of wine from the hands of the king's butler. This he received till the accession of Richard II., when, instead of the wine, twenty marks a year were paid as its money value. Less than two months after the grant of daily wine, Chaucer owed also to John of Gaunt's good-will a place under government as comptroller of the customs and subsidy of wool, skins, and tanned hides in the port of London. The rolls of his office were to be written with his own hand, and none of his duties might be done by deputy. Only three days after he had been enriched with this appointment, John of Gaunt made in his own name a personal grant to Chaucer of ten pounds (represented now by one hundred pounds) a year for life, payable at the manor of Savoy, in consideration of good service rendered by Chaucer and his wife Philippa to the said duke, to his consort, and to his mother the queen. In November of the following year, 1375, Chaucer received, from the crown, custody of a rich ward, Edmund Staplegate of Kent; and this wardship brought him a marriage-fee of one hundred and four pounds, represented now by ten times that amount. Two months later Chaucer obtained another wardship of less value; and in another half-year he was presented with the fine paid by an evader of wool-duties, more than seven hundred pounds of our money. 14. The works of Chaucer hitherto described form a distinct group, marked by the predominating influence of French court poetry. Every young poet must acquire the mechanism of his art by imitation; and the fashion among poets in his younger

a gift worth

days caused Chaucer to learn his art, in the first instance, as an imitator of the trouvères. His individuality is shown from the first, as in the honor paid to marriage; though his models are not of the best, and they do not quicken the development of independent strength. But, as Chaucer became more and more familiar with the great poets of Italy, their vigorous artistic life guided his riper genius to full expression of its powers. Before the age of forty he had, perhaps, not fully outgrown the influences of his carly training. When he had passed the age of forty, Chaucer's writing shows, with the best qualities of his own independent genius, that, where he looked abroad at all for a quickening influence, it was not to France, but to the great Italian writers, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. We thus enter the second period of Chaucer's literary life, -a period in which the poet felt more and more strongly the impulse toward independent song, but in which the strongest external influence is derived from the higher strain of Italian literature.

The first poem falling in this second period is his "Troilus and Cressida,” which is a free version of Boccaccio's "Filostrato," out of octave rhyme into Chaucer's seven-lined stanza. In his rendering of the Italian story the English poet not only so dealt with the baser incidents as to breathe pure air through an unwholesome tale, and even somewhat to spoil the first charm of the story-telling by interpolation of good counsel; but, for love of honesty, he so transformed the character of Pandarus in every respect as to make of it a new creation, rich with a dramatic life that is to be found, outside Chaucer, in no other work of imagination before Shakespeare. Chaucer may have been at work upon his poem, which is in five books and 8,251 lines, in the last years of the reign of Edward III., who died in 1377. Ripeness of age is indicated not only by the breadth and depth of insight shown in the character-painting, but may be inferred also from the grave didactic tone that interrupts from time to time the light strains of a love-story. Such fine hath Troilus for love, says Chaucer, at the close; young fresh folks, he or she, look Godward, and think this world but a fair. Love Him who bought our souls upon the cross, and whose