Perhaps I have no right to speak of Froissart, because he was a Fleming, and did not write in English; but Lord Berners’ spirited translation of his Chronicle (1523) has made it an English classic:[55] moreover, Froissart was very much in London; he was a great pet of the Queen of Edward III.; he had free range of the palace; he described great fêtes that were given at Windsor, and tournaments on what is now Cheapside; a reporter of our day could not have described these things better: he went into Scotland too--the Queen Philippa giving him his outfit--and stayed with the brave Douglas “much time,” and tells us of Stirling and of Melrose Abbey. Indeed, he was a great traveller. He was at Milan when Prince Clarence of England married one of the great Visconti (Chaucer possibly there also, and Petrarch of a certainty); he was at Rome, at Florence, at Bordeaux with the Black Prince, when his son Richard II. was born; was long in the household of Gaston de Foix: we are inclined to forget, as we read him, that he was a priest, and had his parochial charge somewhere along the low banks of the Scheldt: in fact, we suspect that he forgot it himself. He not only wrote Chronicles, but poems; and he tells us, that on his last visit to England, he presented a copy of these latter--beautifully illuminated, engrossed by his own hand, bound in crimson velvet, and embellished with silver clasps, bosses, and golden roses--to King Richard II.; and the King asked him what it was all about; and he said--“About Love;” whereat, he says, the King seemed much pleased, and dipped into it, here and there--for “he could read French as well as speak it.”