How external a way he had of working over old materials, especially in his earlier work, is well illustrated in "The Parliament of Fowls," which he opens by relating the dream of Scipio, originally contained in Cicero's treatise on the "Republic," and preserved by Macrobius. This dream, which tells how Africanus appears to Scipio, and carries him up among the stars of the night, shows him Carthage, and prophesies to him of his future greatness, tells him of the blissful immortal life that is in store for those who have served their country, points out to him the brilliant celestial fires, and how insignificant the earth is in comparison with them, and opens his ears to the wondrous harmony of the spheres--this dream is as far removed from the main argument of the poem as anything well could be a contest between three falcons for the hand of a formel. The bringing together of such diverse elements presents no difficulties to the childlike stage of literary development that depends upon surface analogies for the linking together of its thoughts. Just as talking about his ancestor, the great Scipio Africanus, with the old King Masinissa caused Scipio to dream of him, so reading about this dream caused Chaucer, who has to close his book and go to bed for want of a light, to dream of Scipio Africanus also, who "was come and stood right at his bedis syde." Africanus then plays the part of conductor to Chaucer in a manner suggestive not only of his relations to Scipio, but of Virgil's relation to Dante, and brings him to the great gateway and through it into the garden of love. The description is of the temple of Venus in Boccaccio's "La Teseide." There Nature and the "Fowls" are introduced and described, and at last the point is reached. Nature proclaims that it is St. Valentine's day, and all the fowls may choose them mates. The royal falcon is given first choice, and chooses the lovely formel that sits upon Nature's hand. Two other ardent falcons declare their devotion to the same fowl, and Nature, when the formel declares that she will serve neither Venus nor Cupid and asks a respite for a year, decides that the three shall serve their lady another year--a pretty allegory supposed to refer to the wooing of Blanche of Lancaster by John of Gaunt. The main argument of this poem, when it finally is reached by artificially welding together rich links borrowed from other poets, is one of the few examples in Chaucer of subject-matter derived direct from a real event, but the putting of it in an allegorical form at once lays him under obligations to his poetic predecessors, not only on Anglo-Saxon soil, but in France and Italy.