Out of the windows fly lies and truths, jostling each other, and Fame decides which shall prevail. Shipmen and pilgrims, pardoners and messengers, crowd into the house with boxes crammed with marvellous stories. In one corner of the great hall men are telling love stories, the poet goes to listen to these. Here, just when the climax appears to be in sight, the poem breaks off in the middle of a sentence. Remarkable as it is, full of humour and shrewd observation, and with signs of Chaucer's genius for narrative, it is not in his most characteristic vein. _Troilus and Criseyde_ had already given promise of genius of a very different order, and it is possible that Chaucer himself grew weary of the smooth monotony of his own verse, and felt within him a growing impulse to produce something more human and more vivid. The _Hous of Fame_ is an almost perfect example of a type of poem whose popularity was to continue undiminished for another century and more. It was imitated again and again, and a comparison between it and such works as Lydgate's _Temple of Glas_ is sufficient to show the difference between genius and talent even when genius in working with not wholly congenial material. If Chaucer's reputation rested upon the _Book of the Duchesse_, the _Parlement of Foules_, the _Hous of Fame_, and the _Legend of Good Women_, a few scholars would know and appreciate his work, and anthologies would probably make the majority of readers acquainted with a few carefully-chosen extracts, but he would have done little or nothing to break down the literary conventions of his day. It would need a keen eye to discern in these the dawn of a new era, without the light thrown upon them by _Troilus and Criseyde_ and the _Canterbury Tales_. The _Legend of Good Women_ is said by Lydgate to have been written at the Queen's request. The general plan is taken from Boccaccio's _De Claris Mulieribus_, and Chaucer also translates freely from the _Heroides_ and the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid. The interest of the poem lies in the Prologue, which consists of nearly six hundred lines, and of which there are two distinct versions. The poet describes how in the spring he goes out into the fields to worship the daisy, and he gives a long and poetical description of this "emperice and flour of floures alle." That night he sleeps in a little arbour in his garden, and in a dream he sees the god of love leading by the hand a queen clothed in green and gold and of surpassing beauty. Here follows a ballad in her praise. A rout of ladies now appears, and they all kneel down and sing the praise of their queen. The poet kneels among them, but presently the god of love catches sight of him and declares that he is a traitor and heretic for he has translated the _Romance of the Rose_-- That is an heresye ageyns my lawe, and has also written of the fickleness of Cressida-- Why noldest thou as wel han seyd goodnesse Of women, as thou hast seyd wikkednesse?