there are some lines which I do not exactly comprehend.’ He then quotes as specimens _Bal._ xxxvi, xxxiv, xliii, and xxx, but his transcription is far from being correct and is often quite unintelligible. DATE.--The date at which the _Cinkante Balades_ were composed cannot be determined with certainty. Warton, judging apparently by the style and subject only, decided, as we have seen, that they belonged to the period of youth, and we know from a passage in the _Mirour_ (27340) that the author composed love poems of some kind in his early life. Apart from this, however, the evidence is all in favour of assigning the _Balades_ to the later years of the poet’s life. It is true, of course, that the Dedication to King Henry IV which precedes them, and the Envoy which closes them, may have been written later than the rest; but at the same time it must be noted that the second balade of the Dedication speaks distinctly of a purpose of making poems for the entertainment of the royal court, and the mutilated title which follows the Dedication confirms this, so far as it can be read. Again, the prose remarks which accompany _Bal._ v and vi make it clear that the circumstances of the poems are not personal to the author, seeing that he there divides them into two classes, those that are appropriate for persons about to be married, and those that are ‘universal’ and have application to all sorts and conditions of lovers. Moreover, several of these last, viz, xli-xliv and also xlvi, are supposed to be addressed by ladies to their lovers. It is evident that the balades are only to a very limited extent, if at all, expressive of the actual feelings of the author towards a particular person. As an artist he has set himself to supply suitable forms of expression for the feelings of others, and in doing so he imagines their variety of circumstances and adapts his composition accordingly. For this kind of work it is not necessary, or perhaps even desirable, to be a lover oneself; it is enough to have been a lover once: and that Gower could in his later life express the feelings of a lover with grace and truth we have ample evidence in the _Confessio Amantis_. No doubt it is possible that these balades were written at various times in the poet’s life, and perhaps some persons, recognizing the greater spontaneity and the more gracefully poetical character (as it seems to me) of the first thirty or so, as compared with the more evident tendency to moralize in the rest, may be inclined to see in this an indication of earlier date for the former poems. In fact however the moralizing tendency, though always present, grew less evident in Gower’s work with advancing years. There is less of it in the _Confessio Amantis_ than in his former works, and this not by accident but on principle, the author avowing plainly that unmixed morality had not proved effective, and accepting love as the one universally interesting subject. When Henry of Lancaster, the man