Chaucer's journey to Italy next turned his attention to Italian models. A study of these was of especial service in helping him to acquire that skill which enabled him to produce the masterpieces of his third or English period. This study came at a specially opportune time and resulted in communicating to him something of the spirit of the early Renaissance. The influence of Boccaccio and, sometimes, of Dante is noticeable in the principal poems of the Italian period,--the _Troilus and Criseyde, Hous of Fame_, and _Legende of Good Women_. The _Troilus and Criseyde_ is a tale of love that was not true. The _Hous of Fame_, an unfinished poem, gives a vision of a vast palace of ice on which the names of the famous are carved to await the melting rays of the sun. The _Legende of Good Women_ is a series of stories of those who, like Alcestis, are willing to give up everything for love. In _A Dream of Fair Women_ Tennyson says:-- "'The Legend of Good Women,' long ago Sung by the morning star of song, who made His music heard below; Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath Preluded those melodious bursts that fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still." In this series of poems Chaucer learned how to rely less and less on an Italian crutch. He next took his immortal ride to Canterbury on an English Pegasus. General Plan of the Canterbury Tales.--People in general have always been more interested in stories than in any other form of literature. Chaucer probably did not realize that he had such positive genius for telling tales in verse that the next five hundred years would fail to produce his superior in that branch of English literature. [Illustration: CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL.] All that Chaucer needed was some framework into which he could fit the stories that occurred to him, to make them something more than mere stray tales, which might soon be forgotten. Chaucer's great contemporary Italian storyteller, Boccaccio, conceived the idea of representing some of the nobility of Florence as fleeing from the plague, and telling in their retirement the tales that he used in his _Decameron_. It is not certain that Chaucer received from the _Decameron_ his suggestions for the _Canterbury Tales_, although he was probably in Florence at the same time as Boccaccio.