It needeth neither mast ne rother;
I have not heard of such another.

No maister for the governaunce,
He sayled by thought and pleasaunce
Withouten labour east and west,
All was one, calm or tempést."

The poet travelled with the knight in the same barge, and saw him worthily received in his own country. There the old king, the knight's father, had died seven years before. He bade his barons, when he died, remember his young son, who was gone on a great unknown voyage to seek a princess whom he desired more than riches.

"For her great name that flouréd so

That in that time there was no mo

Of her estate, ne so well named,

For born was none that ever her blamed."

Here, then, was the young prince come back to take his throne, and to prepare for marriage with the princess to whom he had given his word to return by an appointed day. He told his people all the story "in plain English undisguised,"

"And how his day he might not pass,
Without diffame and great blame,
And to him for ever shame."

He asked them how he might within ten days have sixty thousand ready to go with him to his marriage-feast. The lords in council found that, to make due provision, he must give them fifteen days. The prince grieved sorely for the dishonour of his word, and waited fifteen days; at the end of which time he was told that sixty thousand noble blameless knights were by a river bank all ready to embark. The little barge, as a man's thought," took them all on board,

.66

"Horse, mule, trusse ne bagage,

Salade, spear, gard-brace ne page
But was lodged and room enough."

The poet went with them. But when they reached the Island, where they thought to sleep in heaven that night, a lady clothed in black met the Prince with sad cries. The Queen was dead for sorrow of his great untruth. And of the Ladies of the Isle many were dead, the rest

dying; for they were all sworn to eat nothing and drink nothing, and each had a rod for smiting such as would not weep, or such as made countenance to sleep. With such beating they were all as blue as cloth new dyed. Then the Prince stabbed himself for despair and died. His lords ran wild, and the lady in black bade them give to the Queen slain by their breach of promise a chapel in their land.

So the Prince and the Queen and the dead ladies were carried in new hearses over the sea to a city and a royal abbey of black nuns, who said orisons about the hearses.

But on the morrow there befel a wonder. A bird brightly feathered blue and green, with rays of gold between, alighted on the Queen's hearse, and sang low and softly three songs. Then an old knight, by lifting his hand to his hood as a prince passed, frightened the bird, which, in its haste to fly out, beat its wings against a painted window, fell bleeding to the ground, and died. There it lay for an hour or more, until a score of birds had gathered at the broken window with noise of lament. One presently pierced through, bringing in his beak of nine colours a green flowerless herb,

"Full of smalé leaves and plain,

Swart and long, with many a vein,"

In half an hour the

and laid it down by the head of his dead fellow. herb had flowered and its seed was ripe. Then the bird put one of the seeds in his fellow's beak, and the dead bird stood up and pruned himself. Presently both took their flight singing.

But the abbess, who knew the virtue of the herb, caused it to spring and blossom again on the dry hearse of the Queen, and put three of its seeds in the Queen's mouth. Upon which the Queen rose with a smiling countenance. When she was told what had passed, she prayed that she might have seeds to put in the mouth of the Prince, which, 66 so him cured

Then the Queen and the abbess restored life to the dead ladies, and next day there was a Parliament called, at which it was resolved to hold the marriage festival within the isle, with jousts, tourneys, and other sports of arms. Two ladies were sent in the barge with knights and squires and certain letters as an embassage to seek the poet's lady in

"For, but she come, all woll be

every part and bid her to the feast.

wast. After fourteen days they returned with her.

Then the feast was held in tents, near a wood, in open country betwixt a river and a well. It lasted for three months. On the second day, when all others had passed their marriage night, the Prince, the Queen, and all the rest, besought the poet's lady to accept his service.

"And for there should be no nay

They stint jousting all the day."

So the marriage was agreed upon, and was to take place the same night. The happy poet was led with ladies, knights, and squires, and a great host of ministers, and with music, to a tent that served for parish church. There the archbishop and archdeacon sang the service, and after that they dined and danced, and the joyous sound of thousands of instruments troubled the poet in his sleep.

So that he leapt from his bed, and all was still. And there was no creature there, "save on the walls old portraiture of horsemen, hawks and hounds, a hurt deer full of wounds, some like bitten, some hurt with shot, and, as my dream, seemed that was not." Thus in grief he was left to pray that his lady would give substance to his dreaming, or that he might go back into his dream, and always serve her in its Isle of Pleasaunce. Here the poet ends his play of fancy with a hope that he might "dure a thousand years and ten in her good will. Amen, amen. He adds a Balade written in honour of her who may give him the bliss that he desireth oft.

Chaucer, it should be noted-if this indeed be Chaucer -here, as in his earliest verse, and as in his John of Gaunt poems, still celebrates a love whose crown is marriage. The play of fancy is the poet's own. Yet, if dictated by an actual love, surely it is a sport of fancy that will not bear the weight of heavy literal interpretations.

No foreign source has been found for it. The opening is said to have been suggested by Machault's "Dit du Lion." But the "Dit du Lion" is a fragment describing different kinds of lovers, without a thought in it that we might suppose to have been directly copied in the "Dream." The Maidens' Isle of Pleasaunce is said to have come of legends of St. Patrick's "Paradise"; and a poem by Marie de France

M-VOL. V.

is pointed to, containing no more than both poets have in common with nearly all the rhymers of their time. The visit to the island rock has a strained parallel found for it in the navigation of St. Brandon, who sailed seven years with God for pilot, and saw marvels. It is urged that Celtic poetry took pleasure in apple-trees. It is observed that Philip de Vitry, in a translation of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," speaks of Faith, Hope, and Charity, as three golden apples. It is said that there is a ship gifted with intelligence in Marie de France's "Lai de Gugemer," as well as in the "Dit du Lion;" but such ships were not Chaucer's little boat "as a man's thought." It is said finally that, in the "Lay of Eliduc," life is restored by placing magic flowers in the mouth. But that is a notion older than the "Lay of Eliduc ; for so Glaucus, the son of Minos and Pasiphae, was revived after he had been smothered in a cask of honey. These indistinct resemblances in no degree weaken our sense of the substantial originality of "Chaucer's Dream."

William Godwin,† adopting the opinion of Thomas Speght, described this poem as an epithalamium upon the marriage of John of Gaunt, then Earl of Richmond, to the Princess Blanche, on the 19th of May, 1359, and thinks that it was written at the time, because "in the eighth line the author speaks of May as the season of its composition." But it was part of the recipe for writing poems of this sort that the good poet should let a breath of April or May pass over the first chords of his music. Godwin thought much also of the fact that the poet represents his fabulous persons to have married, as the Earl of Richmond really was married, in May, and says of "Chaucer's Dream," that "there is scarcely one of Chaucer's productions the date.

*Cited from Sandras (“Étude sur G. Chaucer,") who lays stress on them, and endeavours to prove therefrom that this is a poem of Chaucer's derived from Celtic sources through the French.

+"Life of Chaucer," second edition (1804), vol. ii., pp. 185-204.

and object of which are more clearly ascertained by internal evidence." The other internal evidence relied upon is that the poet says he dreamed

The well is an old stock property of mediæval verse; but William Godwin sees evidence here of Chaucer's residence in the lodge by Woodstock Park, where there was actually a spring called Rosamond's Well. The poet describes also the chamber in which he dreamt as

"paint

Full of stories old and diverse,"

which "suggests to us ideas of competence and ease, sufficiently confirmed by the remaining vestiges of his habitation; where the chief thing discoverable is the wall inclosing a spacious apartment, said by the persons now residing in the vicinity to have been his chapel." But we have seen that "Chaucer's House" at Woodstock belonged to the poet's wealthy son Thomas, and most probably derived its name. from him. There is no evidence that Chaucer ever lived at

Woodstock.

The other internal evidence declared to be so very strong is the reference to the poet's own love. "His nights," Mr. Godwin observes, "are sleepless, and he wets his pillow with his tears and, in the conclusion of the poem, we find him dreaming that his lady is prevailed upon by the importunity of the knight and princess, and consents to his suit. He awakes, however, and regrets that it is but delusion." With this is connected literal belief that in the "Book of the Duchess," written certainly upon the death of Blanche, "Chaucer is still a lover, and his love is still unrequited," and that "he goes on to assign a precise date to his malady": "I hold it to be a sicknésse

That I have suffered this eight yere,”