r. Even in the joyous "Assembly of Fowls," a marriage-poem,
the same discord already makes itself heard; for it cannot be without
meaning that in his dream the poet is told by "African,"--

--thou of love hast lost thy taste, I guess,
As sick men have of sweet and bitterness;

and that he confesses for himself that, though he has read much of
love, he knows not of it by experience. While, however, we reluctantly
accept the conclusion that Chaucer was unhappy as a husband, we must at
the same time decline, because the husband was a poet, and one of the
most genial of poets, to cast all the blame upon the wife, and to write
her down a shrew. It is unfortunate, no doubt, but it is likewise
inevitable, that at so great a distance of time the rights and wrongs
of a conjugal 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