busy life he turned to books for rest and refreshment. Sad and wakeful he turns "To rede, and drive the night away;" preferring his romance to a game "at chesse or tables." He tells us that when he was busy in the London Custom House, after he had finished his day's work, instead of seeking rest and diversion, he would go home and sit over a book as dombe as any stoon." The character and scope of Chaucer's reading were such as his training and opportunities would lead us to expect. He was a child of foreign influences. Trained in a court where the King could hardly speak an intelligible English sentence, Chaucer's literary inheritance was not English. but Latin and French. He studied the Latin literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; he knew Vergil's Eneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses, and he had some acquaintance with other classical works. But his mother-literature was the French. He read the long French poem, the Romance of the Rose; he was influenced by the lyrics of his French contemporaries, so that, when he began to write, addressing, as he did, a courtly audience whose sympathies were French, he naturally followed the French manner. In the French War, 1359. But reading and poetry formed but part of Chaucer's eventful and many-sided career. Before he was twenty he saw something not only of the court but of the camp and of the field, for he was with the English army in the French campaign. of 1359. While this campaign was marked by no brilliant military exploits, there must have been much to stir the imagination. In those days war was magnificent with that "pomp and panoply" in which poets delight, and Chaucer saw with his bodily eyes such spectacles as poets dream of. As the King's host moved through France, says Froissart, it seemed to cover the country, and the soldiers "were so richly armed and appareled that it was a wonder and a great pleasure to look at the shining arms, the floating banners." And in this mighty army were the King, the Black Prince, and many of the greatest knights and captains of the age. Chaucer learned something too of war's reverses, for he was taken prisoner by the French and ransomed by the King for £16. After his return from the French campaign, Chaucer entered the King's service. In 1367 he was granted a pension of twenty marks as "valet of the King's chamber," and somewhat later he rose to the position of esquire. Before 1379 he had been employed in no less than seven diplomatic missions to various places on the Continent. Early Poems. While Chaucer was thus making his way as courtier, soldier, and diplomatist, he had already begun his work as a poet. He wrote love-lyrics in the French manner, most of which have been lost. He translated the Romance of the Rose (1360-65?). One of his early poems, The Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse (1369), was called forth by the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the wife of John of Gaunt, the poet's patron. The love of Nature, in her milder and fairer aspects, of the soft grass, the birds, the flowers, and the green woods, and a deep and reverent appreciation of the beauty of womanhood, these two traits so characteristic of Chaucer's maturer work, are already apparent in this poem. It is here that we find that melodious and charming description of happy girlhood, which takes its place beside the work of the great masters: "I saw hir daunce so comlily, Carole and singe so swetely Meanwhile Laughe and pleye so womanly, So goodly speke and so frendly, the exact date is not known Chaucer had married a lady whose first name was Philippa. This lady is supposed to have been Philippa Roch, a sister of the third wife of John of Gaunt. First Visit to Italy, 1372. - The King and his advisers appear to have found Chaucer a trustworthy and competent agent, for in 1372 he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Italy. He was abroad nearly a year, visiting Florence and Genoa, and possibly meeting the Italian poet Petrarch, who was staying near Padua at the time. This journey to Italy, and a subsequent visit to Lombardy (1378-79), had a profound effect upon the development of Chaucer's genius. He passed from his northern island into that wonderful land of the south, once the mistress of the civilized world; from the land of mailed knights, to the land of the artist and the scholar; from the old world of the trouvère, to the new world of Petrarch and Boccaccio. In the midst of the fragments of an old civilization, there were already signs of the awakening of a new art and culture. The devotion to beauty, characteristic of the coming era, showed itself in wonders of architecture, in paintings and frescoes; a new literature, inspired by enthusiasm for the masterpieces of antiquity, had already declared itself. Chaucer was the first great poet of England to feel that spell which Italy has exercised over so many English writers from Shakespeare to Browning. His work testifies to the profound impression made upon him by his Italian journeys. In his literary apprenticeship he is the imitator and trans lator of the French poets; then, brought close to another descendant of the same Latin civilization, he draws a fresh inspiration from Italy. - Return to England. After his return to England from this memorable first visit to Italy (1373), Chaucer received various marks of the Royal favor. He was made Comptroller of the Customs on Wool and Hides for the Port of London, granted a pension by John of Gaunt, and sent from time to time on missions to France and elsewhere. In 1382 he became Comptroller of the Petty Customs at London, and in 1386 he was returned to Parliament as one of the Knights of the Shire for Kent. About this time (1385-88), Chaucer may have actually gone upon a pilgrimage to Canterbury, and found in his experience a hint for the setting of his Canterbury Tales. Troilus and Cressida. But Chaucer, like Shakespeare, possessed the rare power of keeping the ideal and the practical side of life in an even balance, and during these active and prosperous years study and poetry were not neglected. Shut in his house at Aldgate he lived in a world of imagination and reminiscence. "There," writes M. Jusserand, "all he had known in Italy would return to his memory, campaniles, azure frescoes, olive groves, sonnets of Petrarch, poems of Dante, tales of Boccaccio; he had brought back wherewithal to move and enliven 'merry England' herself." A number of poems bear the impress of his Italian studies. A long and important poem, Troilus and Cressida (about 1380-1383?), is based on Boccaccio's Filostrato, while the uncompleted House of Fame shows the influence of Dante. In his masterly version of the story of Troilus, the lover, and the beautiful but faithless Cressida, Chaucer is the precursor of the modern novelist. The chief characters are drawn with a subtle |