s and deprived of sleep, the poet has a book
brought to him to while away the hours of night, one of those books that
he loved all his life, where "clerkes hadde in olde tyme" rhymed stories
of long ago. The tale, "a wonder thing" though it was, puts him to
sleep, and it seems to him that it is morning. The sun rises in a pure
sky; the birds sing on the tiled roof, the light floods the room, which
is all painted according to the taste of the Plantagenets. On the walls
is represented "al the Romaunce of the Rose"; the window-glass offers to
view the history of Troy; coloured rays fall on the bed; outside,

the welken was so fair,
Blew, bright, clere was the air ...
Ne in al the welken was a cloude.

A hunt goes by, 'tis the hunt of the Emperor Octavian; the young man
mounts and rides after it under those great trees, "so huge of
strengthe, so ful of leves," beloved of the English, amid meadows thick
studded with flowers,

As thogh the erthe envye wolde
To be gayer than the heven.

A little dog draws near; his movements are observed and noted with an
accuracy that the Landseers of to-day could scarcely excel. The dog
would like to be well received, and afraid of being beaten, he creeps up
and darts suddenly away:

Hit com and creep to me as lowe,
Right as hit hadde me y-knowe,
Hild doun his heed and joyned his eres,
And leyde al smothe down his heres.
I wolde han caught hit, and anoon
Hit fledde and was fro me goon.

In a glade apart was a knight clothed in black, John of Lancaster.
Chaucer does not endeavour to console him; he knows the only assuagement
for such sorrows, and leads him on to speak of the dead. John recalls
her grace and gentleness, and praises qualities which carry us back to a
time very far from our own. She was not one of those women who, to try
their lovers, send them to Wallachia, Prussia, Tartary, Egypt, or
Turkey:

She ne used no suche knakkes smale.[467]

From these "knakkes smale" we may judge what the others must have been.
They discourse thus a long while; the clock strikes noon, and the poet
awakes, his head on the book which had put him to sleep.

II.

In the summer of 1370 Chaucer left London and repaired to the Continent
for the service of the king; this was the first of his diplomatic
missions, which succeeded each other rapidly during the ensuing ten
years. The period of the Middle Ages was not a period of _nuance