close an accordance with examples set in the highest places in the land.
If we are to credit an old tradition, a poem in which Chaucer narrates the
amours of Mars and Venus was written by him at the request of John of
Gaunt, to celebrate the adultery of the duke's sister-in-law with a
nobleman, to whom the injured kinsman afterwards married one of his own
daughters! But nowhere was the deterioration of sentiment on this head
more strongly typified than in Edward III himself. The King, who (if the
pleasing tale be true which gave rise to some beautiful scenes in an old
English drama) had in his early days royally renounced an unlawful passion
for the fair Countess of Salisbury, came to be accused of at once
violating his conjugal duty and neglecting his military glory for the sake
of strange women's charms. The founder of the Order of the Garter--the
device of which enjoined purity even of thought as a principle of conduct-
-died in the hands of a rapacious courtesan. Thus, in England, as in
France, the ascendancy is gained by ignobler views concerning the relation
between the sexes,--a relation to which the whole system of chivalry owed
a great part of its vitality, and on the view of which prevailing in the
most influential class of any nation, the social health of that nation
must inevitably in no small measure depend. Meanwhile, the
artificialities by means of which in France, up to the beginning of the
fifteenth century, it was sought to keep alive an organised system of
sentimentality in the social dealings between gentlemen and ladies,
likewise found admission in England, but only in a modified degree. Here
the fashion in question asserted itself only, or chiefly, in our poetic
literature, and in the adoption by it of such fancies as the praise and
worship of the daisy, with which we meet in the Prologue to Chaucer's
"Legend of Good Women," and in the "Flower and the Leaf," a most pleasing
poem (suggested by a French model), which it is unfortunately no longer
possible to number among his genuine works. The poem of the "Court of
Love," which was likewise long erroneously attributed to him, may be the