exactly
their desire.

There stands by the first, a second House of Fame of a strange sort. It is
built cage-like of twigs, is sixty miles in length, whirls incessantly
about, and is full of all imaginable noises--the rumours of all events,
private and public, that happen upon earth, including murrains, tempests,
and conflagrations. The eagle gets the dreamer in, and he notes the
humours of the place. This is most remarkable, that as soon as any one of
the innumerable persons, in press, there hears a tiding, he forthwith
whispers it with an addition to another, and he, with a further eking, to
a third, until in a little while it is known every where, and has attained
immeasurable magnitude--as from a spark the fire is kindled that burns
down a city. The tidings fly out at windows. A true and a false tiding
jostled in their way out, and after some jangling for precedency, agreed
to fly together. Since which time, no lie is without some truth, and no
truth without some falsehood. An unknown person of great reverence and
authority making his appearance, the poet, apparently disturbed with awe,
awakes, wonders, and falls to writing his dream.

The criticism of so strange a composition is hardly to be attempted. It
shows a bold and free spirit of invention, and some great and poetical
conceiving. The wilful, now just, now perverse dispensing of fame, belongs
to a mind that has meditated upon the human world. The poem is one of the
smaller number, which seems hitherto to stand free from the suspicion of
having been taken from other poets. For Chaucer helped himself to every
thing worth using that came to hand.

The earlier writings of Chaucer have several marks that belong to the
literature of the time.

First, an excessive and critical self-dedication of the writer to the
service of LOVE, this power being for the most part arrayed as a sovereign
divinity, now in the person of the classical goddess Venus, and now of her
son, the god Cupid. Secondly, an ungovernable propensity to allegorical
fiction. The scheme of innumerable poems is merely allegorical. In others,
the allegorical vein breaks in from time to time. Thirdly, a Dream was a
vehicle much in use for effecting the transit of the fancy from the real
to the poetical world. Chaucer has many dreams. Fourthly, interminable
delight in expatiating upon the simplest sights and sounds of the natural
world. This overflows all Chaucer's earlier poems. In some, he largely
de