No sooner, however, has Chaucer made his appearance as a poet, than he seems to show what mistress's badge he wears, which party of the two that have at most times divided among them a national literature and its representatives he intends to follow. The burden of his song is "Si douce est la marguerite:" he has learnt the ways of French gallantry as if to the manner born, and thus becomes, as it were without hesitation or effort, the first English love-poet. Nor--though in the course of his career his range of themes, his command of materials, and his choice of forms are widely enlarged--is the gay banner under which he has ranged himself ever deserted by him. With the exception of the "House of Fame," there is not one of his longer poems of which the passion of love, under one or another of its aspects, does not either constitute the main subject or (as in the "Canterbury Tales") furnish the greater part of the contents. It is as a love-poet that Gower thinks of Chaucer when paying a tribute to him in his own verse; it is to the attacks made upon him in his character as a love-poet, and to his consciousness of what he has achieved as such, that he gives expression in the "Prologue" to the "Legend of Good Women," where his fair advocate tells the God of Love:-- The man hath served you of his cunning, And furthered well your law in his writing, All be it that he cannot well indite, Yet hath he made unlearned folk delight To serve you in praising of your name. And so he resumes his favourite theme once more, to tell, as the "Man of Law" says, "of lovers up and down, more than Ovid makes mention of in his old 'Epistles.'" This fact alone--that our first great English poet was also our first English love-poet, properly so called--would have sufficed to transform our poetic literature through his agency.