CHAPTER I. SECOND HALF OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY: CHAUCER. 1. Chaucer's English.-2. Chaucer's Parentage and Birth-Year.-3. His Education. -4. His Training for Poetry.-5. His Translations of "Le Roman de la Rose" and Boëthius.-6. "The Court of Love."-7. Chaucer's Stanza. - 8. “The Assembly of Foules."-9. "Complaint of the Black Knight.” — 10. Chaucer's Military Career.-11. His "Dream."-12. "Book of the Duchess."-13. His Political Life.-14. Second Period of his Literary Life; "Troilus and Cressida.”—15. “House of Fame.”—16. "Legend of Good Women."-17. His Further Political Life.-18. "The Flower and the Leaf."-19. "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale."-20. His Political Life continued; "The Astrolabe.”— 21. His Last Years.-22. "Canterbury Tales."-23. His so-called Spurious Writings. 1. OUR writers before Chaucer were men speaking the mind of England, either in Latin, the tongue of the learned; or in French, the tongue of the court and the castle; or in English, the tongue of the people. But the English they used differed much, both in vocabulary and in grammatical structure, from the English of to-day. With Chaucer, however, the English language had reached a fulness of development which enables it to speak to us all yet with clearness and a living warmth. 2. Geoffrey Chaucer was the son of John Chaucer, a wine-dealer of London, and was born in that city, perhaps in the year 1328, perhaps not until the year 1340. The first of these dates has been, until lately, the accepted one, and it is not yet by any means abandoned. The argument in its favor rests chiefly on the fact that 1328 is the date given in the inscription on Chaucer's monument in Westminster Abbey. This monument, an altar-tomb under a Gothic canopy, was not erected until the year 1556, when Nicholas Brigham, a small poet who reverenced the genius of Chaucer, built it at his own expense. But we know from Caxton that there was an earlier inscription on a table hanging on a pillar near the poet's burialplace; and Brigham can hardly have done otherwise than repeat on his new tomb the old record, that Chaucer died on the 25th of October, 1400, and that his age was then seventy-two. This date is in harmony with what we know of Chaucer's life and writings. The argument against the former date, and in favor of the latter, rests chiefly on the fact, that, in a certain famous suit, Chaucer served as a witness on the 12th of October, 1386, and that, in the official record of his evidence, he is described as "Geffray Chaucere, Esquier, del age de xl ans et plus, armeez par xxvij ans (aged forty and more, and having borne arms for twenty-seven years). Here it will be observed that upon the point essential to the cause, namely, the length of time during which he had borne arms, the record is exact; for it was in 1359 that he began to bear arms. If, however, he was born in 1328, he was, at the time of giving his testimony, fifty-eight years old; and to many this seems too advanced an age to be fairly described by the phrase," forty years and more;" and accordingly, to such, 1340 seems the very earliest date that can be fixed for his birth. On the other hand, it is to be said that Chaucer probably was not asked his age, since it was not at all material to the case, and since, if he had been asked, the answer would have been more precise. The reporter perhaps glanced at the witness, and set down for age "forty and more," before putting the more material question. Upon the age of a man in middle life the estimates differ widely, according to the sense and eyesight of those who make them, and as men differ widely in the period at which they begin to show signs of decay. Chaucer was healthy, genial, and cheerful. It may well have been enough for a rough estimate of his age to set down that he was on the wrong side of forty," forty and more." References made to his old age in Chaucer's later life forbid us to be misled by the bad guess of an unknown reporter. 3. Chaucer's writings show him to have been a student to the last; we cannot therefore ascribe all his knowledge to the education he had as a youth. But his early writings show a range of culture that could have come only of a liberal education. There is no direct evidence that he studied at Oxford or Cambridge. If he went to either university, probably it was to Cambridge; for in his "Court of Love" he makes his Philogenet describe himself as "of Cambridge, clerk; and in the opening of his Reeve's tale he alludes familiarly to the brook, mill, and bridge, which were "at Trompington, not far fro Cantebrigge." But there are no such familiar references to Oxford in his verse, though it must not be forgotten that the poor scholar sketched with sympathetic touches in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales" was a clerk of Oxenforde. 66 4. Nothing trustworthy is known of Chaucer's occupation during the first years of his manhood. He was a poet, we know ; and perhaps, while training himself for that high service, he may have earned money by assisting in the business of the family. At any rate, there seems no doubt that his method of training himself for poetry consisted of study of the French literature, then most in demand, and of practice in translation. This, then, we may regard as the first period in Chaucer's literary career, that of literary apprenticeship, during which his own work was largely imitative, and the models for his work were French. 5. It was in this time of his life that he turned into English verse the famous French poem called "Le Roman de la Rose," which in the original was begun early in the thirteenth century by William of Lorris, and was finished in the latter part of that century by John of Meung, being a poem of over twenty-two thousand lines. It is an allegorical love-poem, in which the timid grace and the romantic sentiment of its first maker are followed by the boldness, the wit, and the vigor of its second maker, who had no compassion for polished hypocrisy, and annoyed priests by his satire, and court ladies with a rude estimate of their prevailing character. This poem had acquired great popularity throughout Europe, when Chaucer put somewhat less than half of it into English verse, under the title of "The Romaunt of the Rose," the translator allowing himself some freedom both of amplification and of abridgment, and often using that freedom to improve greatly upon the original. It is probable, that, even at an earlier period of his life, Chaucer made his "Translation of Boëthius," which reads like a student's exercise. In the original work, prose is interspersed with poetry; and it is remarkable, that, in his translation, young Chaucer forbore to exercise his skill in English verse, and put the entire book of Boëthius into prose. 6. Chaucer's first original work was probably "The Court of Love," a poem which so clearly derives its allegorical form from a study of "Le Roman de la Rose," that it might most naturally have come into the mind of Chaucer while he was at work on his translation of that poem. But, through forms which he was to outgrow, Chaucer already spoke like himself. In this "Court of Love" he struck the key-note of his future |