around him, even as he had chosen
for his subject one of real national interest.

Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the great Emperor Charles IV, and sister
of King Wenceslas, had been successively betrothed to a Bavarian prince
and to a Margrave of Meissen, before--after negotiations which,
according to Froissart, lasted a year--her hand was given to the young
King Richard II of England. This sufficiently explains the general
scope of the "Assembly of Fowls," an allegorical poem written on or
about St. Valentine's Day, 1381--eleven months or nearly a year after
which date the marriage took place. On the morning sacred to lovers
the poet (in a dream, of course, and this time conducted by the
arch-dreamer Scipio in person) enters a garden containing in it the
temple of the god of Love, and filled with inhabitants mythological and
allegorical. Here he sees the noble goddess Nature, seated upon a hill
of flowers, and around her "all the fowls that be," assembled as by
time honoured custom on St. Valentine's Day, "when every fowl comes
there to choose her mate." Their huge noise and hubbub is reduced to
order by Nature, who assigns to each fowl its proper place--the birds
of prey highest; then those that eat according to natural inclination--

--worm or thing of which I tell no tale;

then those that live by seed; and the various members of the several
classes are indicated with amusing vivacity and point, from the royal
eagle "that with his sharp look pierceth the sun," and "other eagles of
a lower kind" downwards. We can only find room for a portion of the
company:--

The sparrow, Venus' son; the nightingale
That clepeth forth the fresh leaves new;
The swallow, murd'rer of the bees small,
That honey make of flowers fresh of hue;
The wedded turtle, with his hearte true;
The peacock, with his angels' feathers bright,
The pheasant, scorner of the cock by night.

The waker goose, the cuckoo, ever unkind;
The popinjay, full of delicacy;
The drake, destroyer of his owne kind;
The stork, avenger of adultery;
The cormorant, hot and full of gluttony
The crows and ravens with their voice of care;
And the throstle old, and the frosty fieldfare.

Naturalists must be left to explain some of these epithets and
designations, not all of which rest on allusions as easily understood
as that recalling the goose's exploit on the Capitol; but the vivacity
of the whole description speaks for itself. O