Travaile et douleur la hébergent, Mais ils la lient et la chargent, Que Mort prochaine luy présentent, En talant de se repentir; Tant luy sont de fléaux sentir; Adoncq luy vient en remembrance, En cest tardifve présence. Quand il se voit foible et chenue. With her, Labour and eke Travaile Lodgid bene, with sorwe and wo. That never out of her court go Pain and Distress, Sekenesse and Ire, And Melancholie that angry sire, Ben of her palais Senatoures; Goning ana Grutching her herbegeors. The day and night her to tourment, With cruel death they her present, And tellen her erliche and late, That Deth standith armid at her gate. Here Chaucer’s improvements are plainly perceptible; the introduction of Death, standing _armed_ at the gate, is a grand and sublime thought, of which no trace is to be found in the comparatively flat original; not to mention the terrible distinctness with which Chaucer enumerates Old Age’s _Senators_, Pain, Distress, Sickness, Ire, and Melancholy; and her grim chamberlains, Groaning and Grudging. The next poem which we shall mention is the love-story entitled “Troilus and Cresseide,” founded on one of the most favorite legends of the Middle Ages, and which Shakspeare himself has dramatized in the tragedy of the same name. The anachronism of placing the scene of such a history of chivalric love in the heroic age of the Trojan War is, we think, more than compensated by the pathos, the nature, and the variety which characterize many of the ancient romances on this subject. Chaucer informs us that his authority is Lollius, a mysterious personage very often referred to by the writers of the Middle Ages, and so impossible to discover and identify that he must be considered as the Ignis Fatuus of antiquaries. “Of Lollius,” says one of these unhappy and baffled investigators, “it will become every one to speak with deference.” The whole poem is saturated with the spirit not of the Ionian rhapsodist, but of the Provençal minstrel. It is written in the rhymed ten-syllabled couplet, which Chaucer has used in the greater part of his works. In the midst of a thousand anachronisms, of a thousand absurdities, this poem contains some strokes of pathos which are invariably to be found in every thing Chaucer wrote, and which show that his heart ever vibrated responsive to the touch of nature. Though we propose, in a future volume, to give such specimens and extracts of Chaucer as may suffice to enable our readers to judge of his manner, we cannot abstain from citing here a most exquisite passage: it describes the bashfulness and hesitation of Cressida before she can find courage to make the avowal of her love:—