The Fourteenth Century in our island was not what we should now hold up as a model age, a soft age, an orderly age, an instructed age, a pleasant age for a lady or gentleman that has been accustomed to modern ideas and modern comforts to be transferred back into. It was the age of the three first Edwards, Richard II., and Henry IV. in England, and of the Wallace Interregnum, Bruce, David II., and the two first Stuarts in Scotland. Much was done in it, as these names will suggest, that has come down as picturesque story and stirring popular legend. It is an age, on that account, in which schoolboys and other plain uncritical readers of both nations revel with peculiar relish. Critical inquirers, too, and real students of history, especially of late, have found it an age worth their while, and have declared it full of important facts and powerful characters. Not the less the inveterate impression among a large number of persons of a rapid modern way of thinking is that all this interesting vision of the England and Scotland of the fourteenth century is mere poetical glamour or antiquarian make-believe, and that the real state of affairs was one of mud, mindlessness, fighting and scramble generally, no tea and no newspapers, but plenty of hanging, and murder almost _ad libitum_. Now these are most wrong-headed persons, and they might be beaten black and blue by sheer force of records. But out of kindliness one may take a gentler method with them, and try to bring them right by æsthetic suasion. It so chances, for example, that there are literary remains of the fourteenth century, both English and Scottish, and that the authors of the chief of these were Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English literature proper, and John Barbour, the father of the English literature of North Britain. Let us take a few bits from Chaucer and Barbour. Purposely, we shall take bits that may be already familiar. Here is Chaucer's often-quoted description of the scholar, or typical student of Oxford University, from the Prologue to his _Canterbury Tales_:--