ely knew any one
now: "And I had beforehand caused to be written, engrossed and
illuminated and collected, all the amorous and moral treatises that, in
the lapse of thirty-four years, I had, by the grace of God and of Love,
made and compiled." He waits a favourable opportunity, and one day when
the councils on the affairs of State are ended, "desired the king to see
the book that I had brought him. Then he saw it in his chamber, for all
prepared I had it; I put it for him upon his bed. He opened it and
looked inside, and it pleased him greatly: and please him well it might,
for it was illuminated, written and ornamented and covered in scarlet
velvet, with ten silver nails gilded with gold, and golden roses in the
middle, and with two great clasps gilded and richly worked in the middle
with golden roses.

"Then the king asked me of what it treated, and I told him: of Love.

"With this answer he was much rejoiced, and looked inside in several
places, and read therein, for he spoke and read French full well; and
then had it taken by one of his knights, whom he called Sir Richard
Credon, and carried into his withdrawing-room, and treated me better and
better."[457]

Long before this last journey of the illustrious chronicler, Chaucer was
familiar with his poems, and he was acquainted, as most men around him
were, with those of his French contemporaries: Deguileville, Machault,
Des Champs, and later Granson.[458] He sings like them of love, of
spring, of the field-daisy[459]; he had read with passionate admiration
the poem, composed in the preceding century, which was most liked of
all the literature of the time, the "Roman de la Rose."

This famous poem was then at the height of a reputation which was to
last until after the Renaissance. The faults which deter us from it
contributed to its popularity as much as did its merits; digressions,
disquisitions, and sermons did not inspire the terror they do now;
twenty-three thousand lines of moralisation, psychological analysis,
abstract dissertations, delivered by personified abstractions, did not
weary the young imagination of the ancestors. The form is allegorical:
the rose is the maiden whom the lover desires to conquer: this form,
which fell later into disfavour, delighted the readers of the fourteenth
century for whom it was an additional pleasure to unriddle these easy
enigmas.

The Church had helped to bring allegories into vogue; commentators had
early explained th