296 SYLVAN WINTER. 



says that they ' are celebrated, in the annals of 



poetry, as the trees under which — 



" The laughing sage 

 Caroll'd his moral song." 



They grew in the park at Donnington Castle, 

 near Newbury, where Chaucer spent his latter life 

 in studious retirement. The largest of these trees 

 was called the King's Oalc, and carried an erect 

 stem of fifty feet before it broke into branches, 

 and was cut into a beam five feet square. The 

 next in size was called the Queen's Oak, and sur- 

 vived the calamities of the civil wars in King 

 Charles's time, though Donnington Castle and 

 the country around it were so often the scene of 

 action and desolation. Its branches were very 

 curious ; they pushed out from the stem in several 

 uncommon directions, imitating the horns of a 

 ram rather than the branches of an Oak. When 

 it was felled, it yielded a beam forty feet long, 

 without knot or blemish, perfectly straight, four 

 feet square at the butt end, and near a yard at 

 the top. The third of these Oaks was called 

 Chaucer's, of which we have no particulars ; in 

 general, only, we are told that it was a noble tree, 



