the ill-gotten wealth and corruptions of the Church, by certain of his religious doctrines, and John Wyclif. by his translation of the Bible (1380), stands as the greatest mouthpiece of the new spirit and the herald of the Reformation. Wyclif, too, by giving up the Latin of the mediæval schoolmen, and speaking directly to the people in homely English, shows us that learning was ceasing to be the exclusive possession of priest and clerk.

Finally, the new learning of Italy colors the verse of Chaucer, and mingles with its medieval hues. In his work, more than in that of any

Chaucer.

other writer, this crowded fourteenth century survives for us. There, indeed, its men and women breathe and act before us-alive veritably today beyond the power of five centuries of time and change.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER.—1340 (?)–1400

Our knowledge of Chaucer's life is meager and fragmentary; many points are uncertain, and much left to conjecture. Yet Chaucer is real to us through his books, and the little we do know of his life is remarkably significant of its general character.

Geoffrey Chaucer, the son of John Chaucer, a wine merchant on Thames Street, was born in London about 1340. As a boy he learned something of the court, for he was page in the household of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the third son of Edward III. As a youth he knew something of war and camps, for he took part in a campaign in France in 1359, probably as an esquire, was taken prisoner and

ransomed. Attached to the court, he was sent on diplomatic missions to various foreign countries. In 1373 he went to Genoa to arrange a commercial treaty, and remained in Italy about a year. By this, and by a later journey to Italy, he was brought directly under the influence of that new learning which was to re-create the mind of Europe. Here, too, he probably met Petrarch, its greatest living representative. Two years later he was given a position in the custom house at London. In 1386 he was returned to Parliament as Knight of the Shire of Kent, but in the same year lost his place as Comptroller of the Customs, in the absence of his patron, John of Gaunt-the "time-honored Lancaster" of Shakespeare's Richard II. For a while he knew poverty, bearing it with characteristic good humor. On the accession (1399) of Henry IV., the son of his former patron, his fortunes again improved; he was granted an annuity of forty marks, but died on the 25th of the October following; closing the eyes which had seen so much, in his quiet home at Westminster, while the dawn grows over Europe and the new century is born.

world.

Little as we know of Chaucer, we can see at how many points he touched the varied and brilliant life of his time, knowing it not merely as an onlooker, but as a practical man of Man of the affairs, himself an actor in its restless activities. He was a man of the world, but one who added to the quick eye and retentive mind the poet's tenderness and sympathy with suffering, the philosopher's large-minded toleration of human follies and

Student.

mistakes. And Chaucer, like Shakespeare, learned not only from life, but from books. He would return from his work at the custom house to read until his eyes were "dazed and dull." We may agree with Lowell that in Chaucer's description of the Oxford Clerk the poet writes out of the fullness of a personal sympathy.

"For he hadde geten him yit no benefice,
Ne was so worldly for to have office.

For him was levere have at his beddes heede
Twenty bokes, clad in blak or reede,
Of Aristotle and his philosophie,

Then robes riche, or fithele or gay sawtrie."

Chaucer the poet had so absorbed the tales of trou

vère and Italian, as to

verse on English soil.

make them live anew in his

Chaucer the student trans

lated Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and wrote a scientific treatise on the astrolabe.*

Lover of men and lover of books, Chaucer is no less

Love of nature.

the lover of nature, for her alone delighting to leave his studies.

"And as for me, though that I kon but lytee,
On bökes for to rede I me delyte,

And to hem yive I feyth and ful credence

And in myn herte have hem in reverence

So hertely, that ther is game noon,

That fro my bokës maketh me to goon,

But yt be seldom on the holy day,

Save, certeynly, when that the moneth of May

*The influence of this study of Boethius is traceable in Chaucer's poetry; v. ten Brink's English Literature (vol. ii). For Boethius, v. p. 43, supra.

Is comen, and that I here the foules synge
And that the floures gynnen for to sprynge,
Farewel my boke and my devocioun !"*

As we might expect, it is the gayer moods of nature in which Chaucer's light-hearted and kindly temperament finds the greatest solace. The characteristic Chaucerian landscape is glorious in sunshine, the grass grows soft and thick under our feet, and the twitter of birds is everywhere; all the world is new-washed in the freshness of the springtime.

"A gardyn saw I ful of blospemy bowys
Up-on a river in a grene mede,

There as ther swetnesse everemore i-now is ;
With flouris white, blewe, and yelwe, and rede,
And colde welle-stremys no-thyng dede,
That swemyn ful of smale fischis lite,
With fynnys rede and skalis sylvyr bryghte.
On every bow the bryddis herde I synge,
With voys of aungel in here armonye; "—†

Not only in these more extended descriptions, but in many a casual and passing allusion there is that wholesome and vernal freshness which fills us with an ever new delight; the cheerful sun is rising, the east laughs with light, and in the groves the silver drops are yet

"honging on the leves." Indeed, as our own Longfellow says:

"He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
The Canterbury Tales, and his old age

* Prologue to Legende of Good Women.
The Parlement of Foules.

The Knight's Tale, 1. 638.

Made beautiful with song; and, as I read
I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note

Of lark and linnet, and from every page

Rise odors of plowed field or flowery mead."*

A love of the gladness and beauty of God's world, so childlike and spontaneous, rests and refreshes us. Something tells us that the life of the poet who felt thus was at heart sound and good. There are sacred

depths in the rare nature of this seeming man of the world, who takes what life sends "in buxomnesse," who, unlike so many moderns, makes no display of what he is and feels. If we would get some hint of that side of Chaucer which was not "the world's side," let us think of him as he describes himself in one of his poems, going out alone into the meadows in the stillness of the early morning and falling on his knees to greet the daisy.

Chaucer's works.

"The father of English poetry" knew no English masters in his art to whom he could turn for help. Chaucer's early training tended to identify him with the life and literary standards that then prevailed at court, and there both Edward III. and Queen Philippa favored the language and literature of France, even having French poets and "minestrels " in their employ. Among the court circles the old literature of England had no place. So pronounced was this foreign tone, that John Gower (1325(?)-1408), though English by birth, wrote Ballades and a poem called the Speculum Meditantis in French, apologizing for his shortcomings in language "parceque je suis Anglais.” *Sonnet on Chaucer.