ii. DATE AND CIRCUMSTANCES.--The _Confessio Amantis_ in its earliest form bears upon the face of it the date 1390 (Prol. 331 _margin_)[D], and we have no reason to doubt that this was the year in which it was first completed. The author tells us that it was written at the command of King Richard II, whom he met while rowing on the Thames at London, and who invited him to come into his barge to speak with him. It is noticeable, however, that even this first edition has a dedication to Henry earl of Derby, contained in the Latin lines at the end of the poem[E], so that it is not quite accurate to say that the dedication was afterwards changed, but rather that this dedication was made more prominent and introduced into the text of the poem, while at the same time the personal reference to the king in the Prologue was suppressed. If the date referred to above had been observed by former editors, the speculations first of Pauli and then of Professor Hales, tending to throw back the completion of the first recension of the _Confessio Amantis_ to the year 1386, or even 1383, would have been spared. Their conclusions rest, moreover, on the purest guess-work. The former argues that the preface and the epilogue[F] in their first form date from the year 1386, because from that year the king (who was then nineteen years old) ‘developed those dangerous qualities which estranged from him, amongst others, the poet’; and Professor Hales (_Athenæum_, Dec. 1881) contends that the references to the young king’s qualities as a ruler, ‘Justice medled with pite,’ &c. certainly point to the years immediately succeeding the Peasants’ revolt (a time when Gower did not regard him as a responsible ruler at all, but excuses him for the evil proceedings of the government on account of his tender age)[G], that the reference to Richard’s desire to establish peace (viii. 3014* ff.) _must_ belong to the period of the negotiations with the French and the subsequent truce, 1383-84, though Professor Hales is himself quite aware that negotiations for peace were proceeding also in 1389, and finally that the mention of ‘the newe guise of Beawme’ must indicate the very year succeeding the king’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia in 1382, whereas in fact the Bohemian fashions would no doubt continue to prevail at court, and still be accounted new, throughout the queen’s lifetime. It is on such grounds as these that we are told that the _Confessio Amantis_ in its first form _cannot_ have been written later than the year 1385 and was probably as early as 1383.