With such free treatment of his material, Chaucer's next step would be to direct composition, independent of any sources, save in that general way in which every author is under obligation to what has been previously produced. This finds its crowning achievement in the 'Canterbury Tales'; though several earlier pieces--such as the 'House of Fame,' the 'Parliament of Fowls,' and the prologue to the 'Legend of Good Women,'--attest that long before he had shown his ability to produce work essentially original. But though in his literary development Chaucer worked himself out of this exact reproduction of his models, through a partial working over of them till he finally attained complete independence, the habits of a translator clung to him to the very end. Even after he had fully justified his claim to being a great original poet, passages occur in his writings which are nothing but the reproduction of passages found in some foreign poem in Latin, or French, or Italian, the three languages with which he was conversant. His translation of them was due to the fact that they had struck his fancy; his insertion of them into his own work was to please others with what had previously pleased himself. Numerous passages of this kind have been pointed out; and doubtless there are others which remain to be pointed out. There is another important thing to be marked in the history of Chaucer's artistic development. Not only was poetic material lacking in the tongue at the time of his appearance, but also poetic form. The measures in use, while not inadequate for literary expression, were incapable of embodying it in its highest flights. Consequently what Chaucer did not find, he had either to borrow or to invent. He did both. In the lines which have been quoted he speaks of the "ballades, roundels, and virelayes" which he had composed. These were all favorite poetical forms in that Continental country with whose literature Chaucer was mainly conversant. There can be little question that he tried all manner of verse which the ingenuity of the poets of Northern France had devised. As many of his shorter pieces have very certainly disappeared, his success in these various attempts cannot be asserted with positiveness. Still, what have survived show that he was a great literary artist as well as a great poet. His feats of rhyming, in particular in a tongue so little fitted for it as is ours, can be seen in his unfinished poem of 'Queen Anelida and False Arcite,' in the 'Complaint to Venus,' and in the envoy which follows the Clerk's Tale. In this last piece, though there are thirty-six lines, the rhymes are only three; and two of these belong to fifteen lines respectively.