he
locality of it,) down through the Hoods, and Roys, and Grays, to Robin
Goodfellow, and Spenser's "Hobbinol," and our modern "Hob,"--joining on
to the "goblin," which comes from the old Greek [Greek: Kobalos]. But I
cannot let you go without asking you to compare the English and French
feeling about small birds, in Chaucer's time, with our own on the same
subject. I say English and French, because the original French of the
Romance of the Rose shows more affection for birds than even Chaucer's
translation, passionate as he is, always, in love for any one of his
little winged brothers or sisters. Look, however, either in the French
or English at the description of the coming of the God of Love, leading
his carol-dance, in the garden of the Rose.

His dress is embroidered with figures of flowers and of beasts; but
about him fly the _living_ birds. The French is:

Il etoit tout convert d'oisiaulx
De rossignols et de papegaux
De calendre, et de mesangel.
Il semblait que ce fut une angle
Qui fuz tout droit venuz du ciel.

36. There are several points of philology in this transitional French,
and in Chaucer's translation, which it is well worth your patience to
observe. The monkish Latin "angelus," you see, is passing through the
very unpoetical form "angle," into "ange;" but, in order to get a rhyme
with it in that angular form, the French troubadour expands the bird's
name, "mesange," quite arbitrarily, into "mesangel." Then Chaucer,
not liking the "mes" at the beginning of the word, changes that
unscrupulously into "arch;" and gathers in, though too shortly, a
lovely bit from another place about the nightingales flying so close
round Love's head that they strike some of the leaves off his crown of
roses; so that the English runs thus:

But nightingales, a full great rout
That flien over his head about,
The leaves felden as they flien
And he was all with birds wrien,
With popinjay, with nightingale,
With chelaundre, and with wodewale,
With finch, with lark, and with archangel.
He seemed as he were an angell,
That down were comen from Heaven clear.

Now, when I first read this bit of Chaucer, without referring to the
original, I was greatly delighted to find that there was a bird in his
time called an archangel, and set to work, with brightly hopeful
industry, to find out what it was. I was a little discomfited by
finding that in old botany the word only me