First, an excessive and critical self-dedication of the writer to the service of LOVE, this power being for the most part arrayed as a sovereign divinity, now in the person of the classical goddess Venus, and now of her son, the god Cupid. Secondly, an ungovernable propensity to allegorical fiction. The scheme of innumerable poems is merely allegorical. In others, the allegorical vein breaks in from time to time. Thirdly, a Dream was a vehicle much in use for effecting the transit of the fancy from the real to the poetical world. Chaucer has many dreams. Fourthly, interminable delight in expatiating upon the simplest sights and sounds of the natural world. This overflows all Chaucer's earlier poems. In some, he largely describes the scene of adventure--in some, the desire of solace in field and wood leads him into the scene. Fifthly, a truly magnanimous indifference to the flight of time and to the cost of parchment, expressed in the dilatation of a slender matter through an infinite series of verses. You wonder at the facility of writing in the infancy of art. It seems to resemble the exuberant, untiring activity of children, prompted by a vital delight which overflows into the readiest utterance; and, in proportion to its display, achieving the less that is referable to any purpose of enduring use. Even the admired and elaborately-written _Troilus_ and _Creseide_ is a great specimen. The action is nearly null; the discoursing of the persons and of the poet endless. It is not, then, simply the facility of the eight-syllabled couplet, as in that interminable _Chaucer's Dreme_, that betrays; there is a dogged purpose of going on for ever. Of the poems expressly of Love, are, "The Romaunt of the Rose--Troilus and Creseide--The Legende of Goode Women--The Assemblee of Foules--Of Queen Annelida and False Arcita--The Complaint of the Blacke Knight--The Complaint of Mars and Venus--Of the Cuckou and the Nightingale--The Court of Love--Chaucer's Dreme--The Flour and the Leaf--The First Book of the House of Fame"--and, if you choose, the "Boke of the Duchess," which is John of Gaunt's mourning for his lost wife. There must be something like thirty thousand verses, long, short, in couplets or stanzas, which may be said to be dedicated to LOVE!