Chaucer lived now in one of the towers under which opened the gates of London. The municipality had granted him lodgings in the Aldgate tower[483]; his friend the philosopher and logician, Ralph Strode, lived in the same way in rooms above "Aldrichgate"[484]; both were to quit the place at any moment if the defence of the town rendered it necessary. Chaucer lived there twelve years, from 1374 to 1386. There, his labour ended, he would come home and begin his _other life_, his poet's life, reading, thinking, remembering. Then all he had known in Italy would return to his memory, campaniles, azure frescoes, olive groves, sonnets of Petrarch, poems of Dante, tales of Boccaccio; he had brought back wherewithal to move and to enliven "merry England" herself. Once more in his tower, whither he returned without speaking to any one, "domb," he says, "as any stoon," the everyday world was done with; his neighbours were to him as though they had lived at the ends of earth[485]; his real neighbours were Dante and Virgil. He wrote during this period, and chiefly in his tower of Aldgate, the "Lyf of Seinte Cecile," 1373; the "Compleynt of Mars," 1380; a translation of Boethius in prose; the "Parlement of Foules;" "Troilus and Criseyde," 1382; the "Hous of Fame," 1383-4; the "Legend of Good Women," 1385.[486] In all these works the ideal is principally an Italian and Latin one; but, at the same time, we see some beginning of the Chaucer of the last period, who, having moved round the world of letters, will cease to look abroad, and, after the manner of his own nation, dropping in a large measure foreign elements, will show himself above all and mainly an Englishman. At this time, however, he is as yet under the charm of Southern art and of ancient models; he does not weary of invoking and depicting the gods of Olympus. Nudity, which the image-makers of cathedrals had inflicted as a chastisement on the damned, scandalises him no more than it did the painters of Italy. He sees Venus, "untressed," reclining on her couch, "a bed of golde," clothed in transparent draperies, Right with a subtil kerchef of Valence, Ther was no thikker cloth of no defence; or with less draperies still: I saw Beautee withouten any atyr[487]; or again: Naked fleting in a see; her brows circled with a "rose-garlond white and reed."[488] He calls her to his aid: Now faire blisful, O Cipris, So be my favour at this tyme! And ye, me to endyte and ryme Helpeth, that on Parnaso dwelle By Elicon the clere welle.[489] His "Compleynt of Anelida" is dedicated to Thou ferse god of armes, Mars the rede, and to Polymnia: Be favourable eek, thou Polymnia, On Parnaso that, with thy sustres glade, By Elicon, not fer from Cirrea, Singest with vois memorial in the shade, Under the laurer which that may not fade.[490]