in arms merely in order to gain renown, losing his lady perhaps in the meantime at home. We take his side when he complains of the Confessor’s want of feeling for a pain which he does not himself experience, and his readiness to prescribe for a wound of the heart as if it were a sore of the heel. Even while we smile, we compassionate the lover who is at last disqualified on account of age, and recommended to make a ‘beau retret’ while there is yet time. But there is also another character in whom we are interested, and that is the lady herself. Gower certainly appreciated something of the delicacy and poetical refinement which ideal love requires, and this appreciation he shows also in his _Balades_; but here we have something more than this. The figure of the lady, which we see constantly in the background of the dialogue, is both attractive and human. We recognize in her a creature of flesh and blood, no goddess indeed, as her lover himself observes, but a charming embodiment of womanly grace and refinement. She is surrounded by lovers, but she is wise and wary. She is courteous and gentle, but at the same time firm: she will not gladly swear, and therefore says nay without an oath, but it is a decisive nay to any who are disposed to presume. She does not neglect her household duties merely because a lover insists upon hanging about her, but leaves him to amuse himself how he may, while she busies herself elsewhere. If she has leisure and can sit down to her embroidery, he may read to her if he will, but it must be some sound romance, and not his own rondels, balades, and virelays in praise of her. Custom allows him to kiss her when he takes his leave, but if he comes back on any pretext and takes his leave again, there is not often a second kiss permitted. She lets him lead her up to the offering in church, and ride by her side when she drives out, but she will take no presents from him, though with some of her younger admirers, whose passion she knows is a less serious matter, she is not so strict, but takes and gives freely. Even the description of her person is not offensive, as such descriptions almost always are. Her lover suspects that her soul may be in a perilous state, seeing that she has the power of saving a man’s life and yet suffers him to die, but he admits there is no more violence in her than in a child of three years old, and her words are as pleasant to him as the winds of the South. Usurious dealing is a vice of which he ventures to accuse her, seeing that he has given her his whole heart in return for a single glance of her eye, and she holds to the bargain and will not give heart for heart; but then, as the Confessor very justly replies, ‘she may be such that her one glance is worth thy whole heart many times over,’ and so he has sold his heart profitably, having in return much more than it is worth.