the spirit of an author who knows very well what is said against him,
who knows very well what there is in what is said against him, and who
yet is full of that true self-consciousness which holds to its
course--not recklessly and ruthlessly, not with a contempt for the
feelings and judgments of his fellow-creatures, but with a serene trust
in the justification ensured to every honest endeavour. The principal
theme of his poems had hitherto been the passion of love, and woman who
is the object of the love of man. Had he not, the superfine critics of
his day may have asked--steeped as they were in the artificiality and
florid extravagance of chivalry in the days of its decline, and
habituated to mistranslating earthly passion into the phraseology of
religious devotion--had he not debased the passion of love, and defamed
its object? Had he not begun by translating the wicked satire of Jean
de Meung, "a heresy against the law" of Love, and had he not, by
cynically painting in his Cressid a picture of woman's perfidy,
encouraged men to be less faithful to women

That be as true as ever was any steel?

In Chaucer's way of meeting this charge, which he emphasises by putting
it in the mouth of the God of Love himself, it is, to be sure,
difficult to recognise any very deeply penitent spirit. He mildly
wards off the reproach, sheltering himself behind his defender, the
"lady in green," who afterwards proves to be herself that type of
womanly and wifely fidelity unto death, the true and brave Alcestis.
And even in the body of the poem one is struck by a certain
perfunctoriness, not to say flippancy, in the way in which its moral is
reproduced. The wrathful invective against the various classical
followers of Lamech, the maker of tents, wears no aspect of deep moral
indignation; and it is not precisely the voice of a repentant sinner
which concludes the pathetic story of the betrayal of Phillis with the
adjuration to ladies in general:--

Beware ye women of your subtle foe,
Since yet this day men may example see
And as in love trust ye no man but me.

(Lamech, Chaucer tells us in "Queen Annelida and the false Arcite," was
the

first father that began
The love of two, and was in bigamy.

This poem seems designed to illustrate much the same moral as that
enforced by the "Legend of Good Women"--a moral which, by-the-bye, is
already foreshadowed towards the close of "Troilus and Cressid," where
Chaucer sp