umber
of times at the Renaissance and rejuvenated and edited by Marot.

There were several English translations, and one of them was the work of
our young "Valettus camerae regis." This translation by Chaucer is
lost,[463] but we are aware not only that it existed, but even that it
was celebrated; its merit was known in France, and Des Champs, in
sending his works to Chaucer,[464] congratulates him, above all things,
on having "planted the rose-tree" in "the isle of giants," the "angelic
land," "Angleterre," and on being there the god of worldly loves:

Tu es d'amours mondains dieux on Albie
Et de la Rose en la terre Angelique ...
En bon angles le livre translatas.

This authority in matters of love which Des Champs ascribes to his
English brother-author, is real. Chaucer composed then a quantity of
amorous poems, in the French style, for himself, for others, to while
away the time, to allay his sorrows. Of them said Gower:

The lande fulfylled is over all.

Most of them are lost; but we know, from contemporaneous allusions, that
they swarmed, and from himself that he wrote "many an ympne" to the God
of love, "balades, roundels, virelayes,"

bokes, songes, dytees,
In ryme, or elles in cadence,

each and all "in reverence of Love."[465] A few poems, however, of that
early period, have reached us. They are, amongst others, his "Compleynte
unto Pite"--

Pite, that I have sought so yore ago
With herte sore, and ful of besy peyne ...

--a rough sketch of a subject that Sidney was to take up later and bring
to perfection, and his "Book of the Duchesse," composed on the occasion
of the death of Blanche of Lancaster, wife of John of Gaunt.

The occasion is sad, but the setting is exquisite, for Chaucer wishes to
raise to the Duchess who has disappeared a lasting monument, that shall
prolong her memory, an elegant one, graceful as herself, where her
portrait, traced by a friendly hand, shall recall the charms of a beauty
that each morning renewed. So lovable was she, and so full of
accomplishment,

That she was lyk to torche bright,
That every man may take of light
Ynogh, and hit hath never the lesse.[466]

Already the descriptions have a freshness that no contemporaries equal,
and show a care for truth and a gift of observation not often found in
the innumerable poems in dream-form left to us by the writers of the
fourteenth century.

Tormented by his thought