because he was not apt for the business he was then learning. He was set, therefore, to study canon law, that being a very lucrative profession, and spent nearly another six years in proving himself to be unsuited for that. But the new studies had enabled him to master Latin. As he would not make a lawyer, young Boccaccio's father put him back into trade, and sent him to Naples, where King Robert held court in a spirit that would have tempted men less apt than Boccaccio to a career of letters. At the court of King Robert he heard Petrarch discourse of poetry before his crowning with the laurel wreath. There also Boccaccio sang in praise of Fiammetta, for whom he then wrote his "Filocopo," a version of one of the current French metrical romances-that of "Flore and Blanchefleur"-into Italian prose, prolix with invocation, love discourse, and episode. But this was followed by another work, dedicated to Fiammetta, telling in Italian and in octave rhyme, under the title of the "Teseide," that story of Palamon and Arcite, which was Englished afterwards by Chaucer, and leads the series of his "Canterbury Tales," as "The Knight's Tale." Boccaccio was in his twenty-eighth year when he produced this poem. Chaucer was then a boy of about nine. Boccaccio's Italian Theseid was in modern literature the first long narrative heroic poem by a man of genius told straight through without allegory, without verbiage, with simple reliance on its human interest. Its charm was felt wherever Italian was read, and the music also of its new stanza, the octave rhyme. It laid the foundation of modern epic romance. After writing this, Boccaccio, who had returned to his father in Florence, laid the foundation also of pastoral poetry in his "Ameto," "Admetus, Comedy of the Nymphs of Florence" in prose, mixed with rhyme. He represented Admetus as one of rustic unformed mind, civilised by the contemplation of the highest earthly beauty, Lucia or Lia; discoursing with seven nymphs, by whose names and descriptions known ladies were figured, but who allegorically represent the seven sciences; and raised by his sense of earthly beauty, Lucia, to a sense and worship of the heavenly beauty, Fiammetta.

The polished Latin eclogue and rude farces of Italian villagers blended in the foundation of these first pastoral dialogues which, according to Boccaccio's example, were produced in Italy during the next hundred years, with speakers who were nymphs, shepherds, satyrs, demigods

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In 1344, when his old father married again, Boccaccio returned to Naples. King Robert was dead, and his immoral granddaughter Giovanna reigned in his stead. She encouraged men of letters in her way, and sought of Boccaccio licentious tales. She revived all literary love-fashions. Justice was dead in Naples, but the queen's authority was upheld in the Courts of Love. In one of those Courts a question arose one day as to which one of three wishes, if he might have one only, a true lover should desire: sometimes to see his lady, sometimes to discourse of her, or to think softly of her within himself. Boc. caccio argued for the thinking; but when his lady left Naples he questioned the truth of his judgment, and produced, in her absence, his second epic romance, his "Filostrato." This was on the love-story of "Troilus and Cressida," once more a sustained tale in octave rhyme, told rapidly and gracefully, depending wholly upon human interest, but reflecting the low morals of the court for which it was produced. The charm of manner was undeniable, and by his two narrative poems, the "Teseide" and "Il Filostrato," Boccaccio established in Italy octave rhyme, a measure of his own creation, though there had been an occasional chance use of it, as by Jehan de Brienne, King of Jerusalem, more than a century before Boccaccio was born. Boccaccio alone established it as the national measure for use in the telling of heroic or romantic tales by the great poets of later time. Boccaccio was about thirty-four or thirty-five years old when he wrote his “Filostrato,” Chaucer about sixteen.

13. In the doubtful "Court of Love" there is a close translation of two stanzas from the "Filostrato,” besides fainter echo of its music and of that of the "Teseide" here and there. Chaucer afterwards gave his own English rendering of both these poems, and may have begun in his youth to practise himself in verse by translation of some parts of them. In doing so he gave seven lines of English to the eight lines of Italian, and formed out of the octave rhyme of Boccaccio by striking out its fifth line, a measure of his own, not less complete in its harmony. In each measure the lines are of ten syllables. Putting like letters to stand for rhymes, the rhyming in the eight lines of Boccaccio's stanza runs a ba ba b c c, in which the system of the harmony is obvious. In the old Sicilian octave rhyme the verse had simply alternated. Boccaccio turned the closing lines into a couplet, and so gave to the whole measure a sense of perfectness, while adding to its music. Omission of Boccaccio's fifth

line and its rhyme made, Chaucer's stanza run a bab b c c. Here there are seven lines, three on each side of a middle line, which is that upon which all the music of the stanza turns. It is the last of a quatrain of alternate rhymes, and first of a quatrain of couplets. The stanza thus produced has a more delicate music than the Italian octave rhyme out of which it was formed, and it remained a favourite with English poets till the time of Queen Elizabeth. Because it was used by a royal follower of Chaucer's, it has been called "rhyme royal." Let us rather call it Chaucer's stanza.

14. Boccaccio's "Filostrato" was soon followed by "The Decameron," which he was writing at Florence when, in 1359 Petrarch became his guest there for a time, and the friendship between them was established. The terrible days of the Great Plague of 1348-9 were fresh in men's minds. It was the same plague of which, in England, Bradwardine and Holcot died. Madame de Sade-Petrarch's Laura-had been also among its victims. Boccaccio made this plague-time in Florence the groundwork of his plan for a collection, in Italian prose, of the best stories he could find to tell. He imagined that during the ravages of plague, seven fashionable ladies and three fashionable gentlemen withdrew from its perils, and killed time in telling stories to one another as they lounged in a beautiful garden some miles distant from the town. Each told a tale on each of the ten days of "The Decameron," and this was Boccaccio's contrivance for linking together a series of a hundred tales, which became widely famous, called forth many imitations, and produced a form of literature to which we owe the design of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales."

The literature of many succeeding generations also bears witness to the influence of Boccaccio's Latin prose treatises, and of those of Petrarch in a less degree, upon imaginations of the poets.

15. Chaucer seems to have begun with court poetry; and the next evidence we have of the course of his life shows that he had obtained footing at court as an attendant upon the young princes, Lionel and John. Lionel of Antwerp, second son of Edward III., was eight years younger than his brother Edward the Black Prince, and two years older than his next brother, John, born at Ghent, in 1340, and called, therefore, John of Gaunt. The king had a fourth son, Edmund, who was a year younger than John, and a fifth son, Thomas, who was an infant when his

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brothers were young men. So far, as regards his court service, Chaucer's life and poetry are especially associated with the friendship and patronage of John of Gaunt; and we come now to a group of his poems which seems to have been distinctly written for this prince. Prince Lionel was married, when but a boy, in 1352, to Elizabeth Countess of Ulster; and in a fragment of a household book of hers, containing entries of some expenses in the years 1356-9, the name of Chaucer occurs only in 1357-once in April, once in May, and once in December-at a time when another entry shows that John of Gaunt was a visitor at Hatfield. The first entry points to preparations for court ceremonies of St. George's Day, in 1357, against which day the Round Tower at Windsor had been completed in order that the feast of the Round Table of the Knights of the Garter might be celebrated with an unexampled splendour for the two prisoner guests, King John of France and King David of Scotland, who were both, at that festival, among the tilters in the lists. Chaucer's service may only have been transferred for the occasion by Prince John to grace the following of his sisterin-law; but it may be that Chaucer was attached first to the service of Prince Lionel and thence transferred to that of John of Gaunt. In the entries of 1358 and 1359 upon the fragment of the Princess Elizabeth's household book, Chaucer's name does not appear; and 1359 was the date of the marriage of John of Gaunt, with which a group of Chaucer's poems seems to be connected.

On the 19th of May, 1359, John of Gaunt, under his first title as Earl of Richmond, and being then nineteen years old, married Blanche, aged also nineteen, second of two daughters of Henry Duke of Lancaster, the first prince of the blood after the children of the king.

16. Chaucer's Parlement of Foules was probably written for John of Gaunt in 1358. Two unfounded suppositions, (1) that Chaucer was born about 1342, and (2) that all work showing knowledge of Italian must be dated after his first mission to Italy in 1372-3, have made it seem necessary to place this poem at a later date. The marriage of Richard II. to Anne of Luxemburg in 1382 has, therefore, been suggested; also the marriage in 1365 of Enguerrand, the seventh Lord de Coucy, to Isabel, eldest daughter of Edward III. The poem is in Chaucer's stanza, and is in the form of a dream, opening and closing with suggestion of the author as a close student of books.

In the opening of his 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 -through the commentary made upon it by Macrobius, a Neoplatonist grammarian of the fifth century, who connected with it his discourses on the constitution of the universe. "The Dream of Scipio" may, therefore, be named with "The Romaunt of the Rose," as the work which, next to it, 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 Parlement of Foules," Chaucer shows, not for the first time, 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.

In the dream story of his poem, Chaucer personified Nature as she had been personified in the thirteenth century by Alain de l'Isle in a popular Latin book of his, written in prose mingled with verse, and called the "Book of the Complaint of Nature" (De Planctu Naturæ). The character of Genius who comes to confess Nature in the latter part of the "Roman de la Rose" was taken from this work. It was the origin also of Genius who acts as the confessor in John Gower's "Confessio Amantis." Chaucer frankly cited Alain as his authority for the personification of Nature in his poem, where she sits enthroned, on Valentine's Day, calling the birds to choose their mates. The first hint of Chaucer's plan seems to have come to him from a passage in Alain's book, which describes Nature's changing robe as being in one of its forms "so ethereal that it is like air, and the pictures on it seem to the eye a Council of Animals. Here