The animals are perfectly human in character, and give to Henryson, as later to Prior and La Fontaine, the opportunity to show his own wit, humour, and tolerant gentle nature. The tales are told in the seven line stanza, rhyme royal, of Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde". Even to-day they may be read with unfeigned pleasure, for their humorous and human studies of character, for their unostentatious pictures of nature, of the little nest of the field mouse, the moors, the stubble fields, the warm storeroom of the burgess's house, where the town mouse has her hole, and for the unaffected sympathy with our wild kindred of fur and feather. The chatter of the hens, the widows of Chanticleer, when the fox, who has claimed old family friendship with the cock, flatters his vanity and carries him away, is far more pleasing than Dunbar's satire on his revolting Widow and two married women. One hen, Pertok, makes bitter moan for the cock, the common husband of them all, but Sprutok declares her intention to sing, "Was never widow so gay"; she enumerates the faults of the dear deceased; Pertok comes into her way of thinking; and Toppok speaks of the faithlessness of their late Lord. Heaven has punished Chanticleer, who, after all, cheats the fox, and returns to his harem. "The Two Mice" is especially humorous, and as sympathetic as Burns's poem "The Twa Dogs". The tale is so vivid that we feel the keenest anxiety when Gib, or Gilbert, "our Jolly Cat," pounces on the country mouse; the town mouse knows her hole, and has fled thither. The horror of the town mouse when she has rural dainties placed before her by the country mouse, her mincing airs of patronage, are delicately touched; in short, with the Fox's confession to the priestly Wolf, and the Trial of the Fox; and the strained law which the Wolf administers to the Lamb, the fables are animated and delightful poetry in their kind: the Morals, as when the hard lot of the poor husbandmen is described, are far from contemptible. Had Henryson left nothing else we must recognize in him a true son of Chaucer. His "Testament of Cresseyde" begins from a bitter winter night, when alone and snug in his warm room, he mends the fire, takes a drink, lays down his Chaucer, and ends the tale of fair false Cresseyde, whom Chaucer pitied. Chaucer was not the man to have created, like Thackeray, that other Cresseyde, Beatrix Esmond in her matchless bloom of triumphant beauty, and later to have drawn her as the old Baroness Bernstein. What Chaucer held his hand from,--the mediaeval tale of the punishment of false Cresseyde,--Henryson, not without a passion of pity, undertook. The gods sent on Cresseyde's beauty the plague of leprosy, a terrible malady scarcely known by name to the Greeks, but as common in the Middle Ages as in ancient Israel.