This exaggeration of an immense natural power, Love--making, one might almost say, man's worship of woman the great religion of the universe, and which was the "amabilis insania" of the new poetry--long exercised an unlimited monarchy in the poetical mind of the reasonable Chaucer. See the longest and most desperate of his Translations--which Tyrwhitt supposes him to have completed, though we have only two fragments--seven thousand verses in place of twenty-two thousand--the "ROMAUNT OF THE ROSE," otherwise entitled the "Art of Love," "wherein are shewed the helps and furtherances, as also the lets and impediments, that lovers have in their suits." Then comes the work upon which Sir Philip Sydney seems to rest the right of Chaucer to the renown of an excellent poet having the insight of his art--the five long books which celebrate the type of all true lovers, Troilus, and of all false traitresses, Creseide. Then there is "The Legende of GOODE Women," the loving heroines, fabulous and historical, of Lempriere's dictionary. The first name is decisive upon the signification of "_goode_"--Cleopatras, Queene of Egypt--Tisbe of Babylon--Dido, Queene of Carthage--Hipsiphile and Medea, betrayed both by the same "root of false lovers, Duk Jason"--Lucrece of Rome--Ariadne of Athens--Philomen--Phillis--Hypermnestra. The "Assemblee of Foules" is all for love and allegory. Chaucer has been reading Scipio's dream. Whereon he himself dreams that "Affrican" comes to him, and carries him away into a sort of Love's Paradise. There were trees with leaves "grene as emeraude," a garden full of "blossomed bowis," running waters in which small fishes light, with red fins and silver-bright scales, dart to and fro, flowers of all tinctures, all manner of live creatures, and a concert commingled of stringed instruments, of leaves murmuring to the wind, and of singing-birds. Under a tree, beside a spring, was "Cupide our Lord" forging and filing his arrows--his daughter (_who is she?_) assisting, and tempering them to various effects. A host of allegorical persons are in attendance of course; and there, too, stands a Temple of Venus, described from the Teseida of Boccaccio. But the principal personage whom Chaucer encounters, and the most busily engaged, is the great goddess, NATURE. It is St Valentine's Day, whereon all the birds choose their mates for the coming year. The particular business to which _this_ anniversary of the genial Saint is devoted was intelligible, no doubt, to the quick wits of Chaucer's age, if to the dull ones of ours a little perplexing. Nature held in her hand "a formell eagle, of shape the gentillest," benign, goodly, and so full of every virtue, that "Nature herself had blisse to looke on her, and oft her beeke to kisse." The question is, who shall be her mate? Three "tercell eagles" offer themselves, and eagerly plead their claims. The four orders of fowl, those "of ravine," those that feed on