dant of Chaucer's relatively close study of a poet
with whose genius his own had so few points in common. Notwithstanding
first appearances, it is an open question whether Chaucer had ever read
Boccaccio's "Decamerone," with which he may merely have had in common
the sources of several of his "Canterbury Tales." But as he certainly
took one of them from the "Teseide" (without improving it in the
process), and not less certainly, and adapted the "Filostrato" in his
"Troilus and Cressid," it is strange that he should refrain from naming
the author to whom he was more indebted than to any one other for
poetic materials.

But wide and diverse as Chaucer's reading fairly deserves to be called,
the love of nature was even stronger and more absorbing in him than the
love of books. He has himself, in a very charming passage, compared
the strength of the one and of the other of his predilections:--

And as for me, though I have knowledge slight,
In bookes for to read I me delight,
And to them give I faith and full credence,
And in my heart have them in reverence
So heartily, that there is game none
That from my bookes maketh me be gone,
But it be seldom on the holiday,--
Save, certainly, when that the month of May
Is come, and that I hear the fowles sing,
And see the flowers as they begin to spring,
Farewell my book, and my devotion.

Undoubtedly the literary fashion of Chaucer's times is responsible for
part of this May-morning sentiment, with which he is fond of beginning
his poems (the Canterbury pilgrimage is dated towards the end of
April--but is not April "messenger to May"?). It had been decreed that
flowers should be the badges of nations and dynasties, and the tokens
of amorous sentiment; the rose had its votaries, and the lily, lauded
by Chaucer's "Prioress" as the symbol of the Blessed Virgin; while the
daisy, which first sprang from the tears of a forlorn damsel, in France
gave its name (marguerite) to an entire species of courtly verse. The
enthusiastic adoration professed by Chaucer, in the "Prologue" to the
"Legend of Good Women," for the daisy, which he afterwards identifies
with the good Alceste, the type of faithful wifehood, is of course a
mere poetical figure. But there is in his use of these favourite
literary devices, so to speak, a variety in sameness significant of
their accordance with his own taste, and of the frank and fresh love of
nature which animated him, and which