meetings with celebrated men, love of wife and children, and their deaths, freedom and captivity, the light of a king's smile and its withdrawal, furnished ample matter of meditation to his humane and thoughtful spirit. In his youth he wrote allegories full of ladies and knights dwelling in impossible forests and nursing impossible passions; but in his declining years, when fortune had done all it could for him and all it could against him, he discarded these dreams, and betook himself to the actual stuff of human nature. Instead of the "Romance of the Rose," we have the "Canterbury Tales" and the first great English poet. One likes to fancy Chaucer in his declining days living at Woodstock, with his books about him, and where he could watch the daisies opening themselves at sunrise, shutting themselves at sunset, and composing his wonderful stories, in which the fourteenth century lives,--riding to battle in iron gear, hawking in embroidered jerkin and waving plume, sitting in rich and solemn feast, the monarch on the dais. Chaucer's early poems have music and fancy, they are full of a natural delight in sunshine and the greenness of foliage; but they have little human interest. They are allegories for the most part, more or less satisfactorily wrought out. The allegorical turn of thought, the delight in pageantry, the "clothing upon" of abstractions with human forms, flowered originally out of chivalry and the feudal times. Chaucer imported it from the French, and was proud of it in his early poems, as a young fellow of that day might be proud of his horse furniture, his attire, his waving plume. And the poetic fashion thus set retained its vitality for a long while,--indeed, it was only thoroughly made an end of by the French Revolution, which made an end of so much else. About the last trace of its influence is to be found in Burns' sentimental correspondence with Mrs. M'Lehose, in which the lady is addressed as Clarinda, and the poet signs himself Sylvander. It was at best a mere beautiful gauze screen drawn between the poet and nature; and passion put his foot through it at once. After Chaucer's youth was over, he discarded somewhat scornfully these abstractions and shows of things. The "Flower and the Leaf" is a beautiful-tinted dream; the "Canterbury Tales" are as real as anything in Shakspeare or Burns. The ladies in the earlier poems dwell in forests, and wear coronals on their heads; the people in the "Tales" are engaged in the actual concerns of life, and you can see the splashes of mire upon their clothes. The separate poems which make up the "Canterbury Tales" were probably written at different periods, after youth was gone, and when he had fallen out of love with florid imagery and allegorical conceits; and we can fancy him, perhaps fallen on evil days and in retirement, anxious to gather up these loose efforts into one consummate whole. If of his flowers he would make a bouquet for