And of them all, only the four following Poems tread the plain ground--have their footing upon the same earth that we walk--Troilus and Creseide, The Legende of Goode Women, Queen Annelida and False Arcita, the Complaint of the Blacke Knight. We grant them for human and real, notwithstanding that most of the persons are of a very romantic and apocryphal stamp--because they are not presented in dreams or visions, and are not allegorical creations of beings out of the air, Impersonations of Ideas. They are offered as men and women, downright flesh and blood, and so are to be understood. Nevertheless even here, when Chaucer is nearest home, taking his subject in his own day, and putting his own friend and patron in verse, there is a trick of the riddling faculty, since the Blacke Knight lodging, during the love-month of May, in the greenwood, and bemoaning all day long his hard love-hap, represents, it is presumed, old stout John of Gaunt in love, who might utter his passion, uncertain of requital, "In groans that thunder love, in sighs of fire;" but who, most assuredly, did not build himself a forest bower, and annually retire from court and castle, to spend there a lovesick May. Of absolutely fanciful creations are, as we have seen, the "Assemblee of Foules," and the "Complaint of Mars and Venus," which the poet overhears a fowl singing on St Valentine's Day ere sunrise. "Of the Cuckou and Nightingale:" the poet, between _waking and sleeping_, hears the bird of hate and the bird of music dispute against and for love. When the nightingale takes leave of him, he wakes. "The Court of Love." The poet, at the age of eighteen, is summoned by Mercury to do his obeisance at the Court of Love, "a lite before the Mount of Citheree," called further on Citheron. He is, on this occasion, not asleep at all, but dreams away like any other poet, with his eyes open, in broad daylight.