formula of execration in use among the people. In this year 1377, London,
where Chaucer was doubtless born as well as bred, where the greater part
of his life was spent, and where the memory of his name is one of those
associations which seem familiarly to haunt the banks of the historic
river from Thames Street to Westminster, apparently numbered not more than
35,000 souls. But if, from the nature of the case, no place was more
exposed than London to the inroads of the Black Death, neither was any
other so likely elastically to recover from them. For the reign of Edward
III had witnessed a momentous advance in the prosperity of the capital,--
an advance reflecting itself in the outward changes introduced during the
same period into the architecture of the city. Its wealth had grown
larger as its houses had grown higher; and mediaeval London, such as we
are apt to picture it to ourselves, seems to have derived those leading
features which it so long retained, from the days when Chaucer, with
downcast but very observant eyes, passed along its streets between
Billingsgate and Aldgate. Still, here as elsewhere in England the
remembrance of the most awful physical visitations which have ever
befallen the country must have long lingered; and, after all has been
said, it is wonderful that the traces of them should be so exceedingly
scanty in Chaucer's pages. Twice only in his poems does he refer to the
Plague:--once in an allegorical fiction which is of Italian if not of
French origin, and where, therefore, no special reference to the ravages
of the disease IN ENGLAND may be intended when Death is said to have "a
thousand slain this pestilence,"--

he hath slain this year
Hence over a mile, within a great village
Both men and women, child and hind and page.

The other allusion is a more than half humorous one. It occurs in the