34 love's meinie. 



well worth your patience to observe. The monkish Latin 

 " angelus," you see, is passing through the very unpoetical 

 form " angle," into " ange ; " but, in order to get a rhyme 

 with it in that angular form, the French troubadour ex- 

 pands the bird's name, " mesange," quite arbitrarily, into 

 " mesangel." Then Chaucer, not liking the " mes " at the 

 beginning of the word, changes that unscrupulously into 

 " arch ; " and gathers in, though too shortly, a lovely bit 

 from another place about the nightingales flying so close 

 round Love's head that they strike some of the leaves off 

 his crown of roses ; so that the English runs thus : 



But nightingales, a full great rout 



That flien over his head about, 



The leaves felden as they tiien 



And he was all with birds wrien, 



"With popinjay, with nightingale, 



With chelaundre, and with wodewale, 



With finch, with lark, and with archangel. 



He seemed as he were an angeU, 



That down were comen from Heaven clear. 



N"ow, when I first read this bit of Chaucer, without re- 

 ferring to tbe orio-inal, I was e-reatlv delis^hted to find 

 that there was a bird in his time called an archangel, and 

 set to woi-k, with brightly hopeful industry, to find out 

 what it M-as. I Avas a little discomfited bv findins' tliat 

 in old botanv the word onlv meant " dead-nettle," but 

 was still sanguine about my bird, till I found the French 

 form descend, as you have seen, into a Jiiesangel, and 

 finally into mesange, which is a provincialism from fMecov 



