ou and the Nightingale" is a mere
extolling of love and the May. The exordium is a sort of incidental hymn
to the Love-god, and runs into affirming and arguing at some length the
peculiar energy of his dominion in this month.

"And most his might he shedeth ever in May."

The Complaint of the Black Knight--love is his complaint--falls in May.
The unhappy lover has built himself a lodge or bower in the greenwood,
whether with returning May he withdraws himself from all feasts,
societies, and throngs of men, to dedicate himself to love-mourning, and
where, under the trees, whilst the month of love lasts, he remains
abandoned to his love-martyrdom. That 'Dreme of Chaucer,' which has been
supposed, although Tyrwhitt thinks fancifully, to refer to the marriage of
John of Gaunt with the Lady Blanche, happens as he lay alone on a night of
May thinking of his lady. The opening of the Flower and Leaf puts you in
doubt whether you are not rather in April than in May; but by and by you
find that the nightingale has been all the day long singing the service of
May. All this amorous and poetical caressing of the May discovers, in the
twice resting the process of events in "The Knight's Tale" upon the
observance of May-day, a significancy otherwise perhaps less evident.
Shakspeare, in the verse--

"As full of spirits as the month of May,"

expresses the natural ground which ceremony and eulogy, solemn or quaint,
have artificially displayed in the usages of old times, and in the poetry
of Chaucer.

But to return to our two knights. They are _brothers-in-arms_--by the by,
rather a romantic, than a classical institution--and so pledged to help
one another in love; and the question arises, as the ground of a long
argument, which is traitor to the other. Yet here, too, is intermixed the
classical with the romantic. For Palamon, who first sees Emelie, takes her
for the goddess Venus; on which Arcite ingeniously founds his own plea,
that _he_ first loved her as a woman, and so is entitled to the help of
the other. Their silent arming of one another, for mortal duel, in the
forest, each

"As frendly as he were his owen brother,"

reminds you of chivalrous loyalty and faith; although it would be hard to
deny that the antique warriors might have been as honest. But the truth
is, that in Homer every knight arms himself, and the two Thebans must have
worn modern armour to need this help. And yet here what a classical relief
in the