Up flies the alarmed heron, his long blue legs trailing behind him; a hawk is let loose; the young lady's laugh has ceased as, with gloved hand shading fair forehead and sweet gray eye, she watches hawk and heron lessening in heaven. The Crusades are now over, but the religious fervour which inspired them lingered behind; so that, even in Chaucer's day, Christian kings, when their consciences were oppressed by a crime more than usually weighty, talked of making an effort before they died to wrest Jerusalem and the sepulchre of Christ from the grasp of the infidel. England had at this time several holy shrines, the most famous being that of Thomas a Becket at Canterbury, which attracted crowds of pilgrims. The devout travelled in large companies: and, in the May mornings, a merry sight it was as, with infinite clatter and merriment, with bells, minstrels, and buffoons, they passed through thorp and village, bound for the tomb of St. Thomas. The pageant of events, which seems enchantment when chronicled by Froissart's splendid pen, was to Chaucer contemporaneous incident; the chivalric richness was the familiar and every-day dress of his time. Into this princely element he was endued, and he saw every side of it,--the frieze as well as the cloth of gold. In the "Canterbury Tales" the fourteenth century murmurs, as the sea murmurs in the pink-mouthed shells upon our mantelpieces. Of his life we do not know much. In his youth he studied law and disliked it,--a circumstance common enough in the lives of men of letters, from his time to that of Shirley Brooks. How he lived, what he did when he was a student, we are unable to discover. Only for a moment is the curtain lifted, and we behold, in the old quaint peaked and gabled Fleet Street of that day, Chaucer thrashing a Franciscan friar (friar's offence unknown), for which amusement he was next morning fined two shillings. History has preserved this for us, but has forgotten all the rest of his early life, and the chronology of all his poems. What curious flies are sometimes found in the historic amber! On Chaucer's own authority, we know that he served under Edward III. in his French campaign, and that he for some time lay in a French prison. On his return from captivity he married; he was valet in the king's household, he was sent on an embassy to Genoa, and is supposed to have visited Petrarch, then resident at Padua, and to have heard from his lips the story of "Griselda,"--a tradition which one would like to believe. He had his share of the sweets and the bitters of life. He enjoyed offices and gifts of wine, and he felt the pangs of poverty and the sickness of hope deferred. He was comptroller of the customs for wools; from which post he was dismissed,--why, we know not; although one cannot help remembering that Edward made the writing out of the accounts in Chaucer's own hand the condition of his holding office, and having one's surmises. Foreign countries, strange manners,