In Chaucer thus we find every kind of possible allegory. There is the thoroughly _creative_ allegory, when thoughts are turned into beings, and impersonated abstract ideas appear as deities, and as attendants on deities. This is the unsubstantial allegory, which has, it must be owned, a different meaning to different climes and times. For example, to the belief of the old Greeks, Aphrodite and Eros, albeit essentially thoughts, had flesh that could be touched, wounded even, and veins, in which for blood ran ichor. In the verses of our old poet and his contemporaries, Venus and Cupid are as active as they were with Homer and Anacreon; only, that now their substance has imperceptibly grown attenuate. So that in the "Assemblee of Foules," for example, these two celestial potentates are upon an equal footing, for subsistency and reality, with the great goddess Dame Nature, who seems to be more of modern than of ancient invention, and with Plesaunce, Arrai, Beautee, Courtesie, Craft, Delite, Gentlenesse, and others enow, whom the poet found in attendance upon the Love-god and his mother. With or without belief, this belongs to all the ages of poetry, from the beginning to the consummation of the world. Then there is the _disguising_ allegory--for by no other appellation can it be described--which may be of a substantial kind. For example, the Black Knight, as we have seen, forlorn in love, builds himself a lodge in the wild-wood, to which he resorts during the month of May, and mourns the livelong day under the green boughs. If the conjecture which Tyrwhitt throws out, but without much insisting upon it, that John of Gaunt, wooing his Duchess Blanche, is here figured, this is a _disguising_ allegory of the lowest ideal idealization. The conjecture of Tyrwhitt, whether exact or not, quite agrees to the art of poetical invention in that age. That old and deeply-rooted species of fable, which ascribes to the inferior animals human mind and manners, was another prevalent allegory. Usually, the picture of humanity so conveyed is of a general nature. But if, as has been guessed, the first and noblest of the Three Tercels that woo the "formell eagle," in the Assemblee of Foules, be the same John of Gaunt wooing the same Blanche, here would be two varieties of allegory--the disguising of particular persons and events, and the veiling of human actions and passions, under the semblance of the inferior kinds--mixed in this part of the poem, which, in as much as it also introduces wholly ideal personages, would, if the key to the enigma has been truly found, very fully exemplify the allegorizing genius of the old poetry.