After such a warning there would be nothing it seems but to hold our tongue; but perhaps, taking the practical side of the question, we may consider that by this time Lodge's rapier must have grown very rusty, and would not offer more danger than any critic is bound to incur in the performance of his duty. Besides that admiration may in all sincerity be blended with criticism when it is a question of Lodge's masterpiece, "Rosalynde." The tale itself bears a somewhat curious history. Twice at two hundred years' distance it took the fancy of the greatest genius of the period. In the Middle Ages it was called the "Tale of Gamelyn,"[156] and Chaucer apparently intended to work it into his "Canterbury Tales," but he died before he had completed his wish, and some copy of the rough old poem having, as it seems, been found among his papers, it was in after time inserted in the manuscripts of his works as the "Cooke's Tale." As it stood in the fourteenth century this story recited mere deeds of valour, of strong, sinewy fighters; love and women played no part in it; and it is a great loss for us not to know whether old Chaucer would have made this very necessary addition, and what sort of mediaeval Rosalind he would have depicted. As things went, we are indebted to our gentleman adventurer for the invention of Rosalind. Lodge took up the tale and remodelled it entirely; he gave place in it to the fair she-page and to her friend Alinda and to Phoebe, the hard-hearted shepherdess, in such a way that when Shakespeare in his turn bethought himself of this story, he had nothing to add to fit it for his own stage, nothing except genius. [Illustration: PREPARING FOR THE HUNT, 1575.]