disagreement or estrangement cannot with safety be adjusted. Yet again,
because we refuse to blame Philippa, we are not obliged to blame Chaucer.
At the same time it must not be concealed, that his name occurs in the
year 1380 in connexion with a legal process of which the most obvious,
though not the only possible, explanation is that he had been guilty of a
grave infidelity towards his wife. Such discoveries as this last we might
be excused for wishing unmade.

Considerable uncertainty remains with regard to the dates of the poems
belonging to this seemingly, in all respects but one, fortunate period of
Chaucer's life. Of one of these works, however, which has had the curious
fate to be dated and re-dated by a succession of happy conjectures, the
last and happiest of all may be held to have definitively fixed the
occasion. This is the charming poem called the "Assembly of Fowls," or
"Parliament of Birds"--a production which seems so English, so fresh from
nature's own inspiration, so instinct with the gaiety of Chaucer's own
heart, that one is apt to overlook in it the undeniable vestiges of
foreign influences, both French and Italian. At its close the poet
confesses that he is always reading, and therefore hopes that he may at
last read something "so to fare the better." But with all this evidence
of study the "Assembly of Fowls" is chiefly interesting as showing how
Chaucer had now begun to select as well as to assimilate his loans; how,
while he was still moving along well-known tracks, his eyes were joyously
glancing to the right and the left; and how the source of most of his
imagery at all events he already found in the merry England around him,
even as he had chosen for his subject one of real national interest.

Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the great Emperor Charles IV, and sister of
King Wenceslas, had been successively betrothed to a Bavarian prince and
to a Margrave of Meissen, before--after negotiations which, according to