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 nuances; that nuance which distinguishes an ambassador from a messenger was held as insignificant, and escaped observation; the two functions formed but one. "You," said Eustache Des Champs, "you, ambassador and messenger, who go about the world to do your duty at the Courts of great princes, your journeys are not short ones!... Don't be in such a hurry; your plea must be submitted to council before an answer can be returned: just wait a little more, my good friend; ... we must talk of the matter with the chancellor and some others.... Time passes and all turns out wrong."[468] Precedents are a great thing in diplomacy; here we find a time-honoured one.
Recourse was often had to men of letters, for these mixed functions, and they were filled by the most illustrious writers of the century, Boccaccio in Italy, Chaucer in England, Des Champs in France. The latter, whose career much resembles Chaucer's, has traced the most lamentable pictures of the life led by an "ambassador and messenger" on the highways of Europe: Bohemia, Poland, Hungary; in these regions the king's service caused him to journey. His horse is half dead, and "sits on his knees"[469]; the inhabitants have the incivility to speak only their own language, so that one cannot even order one's dinner; you must needs take what is served: "'Tis ill eating to another's appetite."[470]
The lodging is worse: "No one may lie by himself, but two by two in a dark room, or oftener three by three, in one bed, haphazard." One may well regret sweet France, "where each one has for his money what he chooses to ask for, and at reasonable price: room to himself, fire, sleep, repose, bed, white pillow, and scented sheets."[471]