maketh so queint his robe and faire,
That it had hewes an hundred paire,
Of grasse and floures, of Inde and Pers,
And many hewes full divers:
That is the robe I mean ywis
Through which the ground to praisen is."

In like manner, wherever throughout his poems we find Chaucer
enthusiastic, it is on a sunny day in the "good green-wood," but the
slightest approach to the sea-shore makes him shiver; and his antipathy
finds at last positive expression, and becomes the principal foundation
of the Frankeleine's Tale, in which a lady, waiting for her husband's
return in a castle by the sea, behaves and expresses herself as
follows:--

"Another time wold she sit and thinke,
And cast her eyen dounward fro the brinke;
But whan she saw the grisly rockes blake,
For veray fere so wold hire herte quake
That on hire feet she might hire not sustene
Than wold she sit adoun upon the grene,
And pitously into the see behold,
And say right thus, with careful sighes cold.
'Eterne God, that thurgh thy purveance
Ledest this world by certain governance,
In idel, as men sain, ye nothing make.
_But, lord, thise grisly fendly rockes blake,
That semen rather a foule confusion
Of werk, than any faire creation_
Of swiche a parfit wise God and stable,
Why han ye wrought this werk unresonable?'"

The desire to have the rocks out of her way is indeed severely punished
in the sequel of the tale; but it is not the less characteristic of the
age, and well worth meditating upon, in comparison with the feelings of
an unsophisticated modern French or English girl among the black rocks
of Dieppe or Ramsgate.

On the other hand, much might be said about that peculiar love of _green
fields and birds_ in the Middle Ages; and of all with which it is
connected, purity and health in manners and heart, as opposed to the
too frequent condition of the modern mind--

"As for the birds in the thicket,
Thrush or ousel in leafy niche,
Linnet or finch--she was far too rich
To care for a morning concert to which
She was welcome, without a ticket."[M]

[M] Thomas Hood.

But this would lead us far afield, and the main fact I have to point out
to the reader is the transition of human grace and strength from the
exercises of the land to those of the sea in the course of the last
three centuries.

Down to Elizabeth's time chivalry lasted; and grace