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CHAUCER.

[Born, 1328. Died, October 25th 1400.]

GEOFFREY CHAUCER, according to his own account, was born in London, and the year 1328 is generally assigned as the date of his birth. The name is Norman, and, according to Francis Thynne, the antiquarian, is one of those, on the roll of Battle Abbey, which came in with William the Conqueror*. It is uncertain at which of the universities he studied. Warton and others, who allege that it was at Oxford, adduce no proof of their assertion; and the signature of Philogenet of Cambridge, which the poet himself assumes in one of his early pieces, as it was fictitious in the name, might be equally so in the place; although it leaves it rather to be conjectured that the latter university had the honour of his education. The precise time at which he first attracted the notice of his munificent patrons, Edward III. and John of Gaunt, cannot be ascertained; but if his poem, entitled The Dreme, be rightly supposed to be an epithalamium on the nuptials of the latter prince with Blanche heiress of Lancaster, he must have enjoyed the court patronage in his thirty-first year. The same poem contains an allusion to the poet's own attachment to a lady at court, whom he afterwards married. She was maid of honour to Philippa, queen of Edward III., and a younger sister of Catherine Swinford†,

* Vide Thynne's animadversions on Speght's edition of Chaucer, in the Rev. J. H. Todd's Illustrations of Gower and Chaucer, p. 18. Thynne calls in question Speght's supposition of Chaucer being the son of a vintner, which Mr. Godwin, in his Life of Chaucer, has adopted. Respecting the arms of the poet, Thynne (who was a herald) farther remarks to Speght, "you set down that some heralds are of opinion that he did not descend from any great house, whiche they gather by his armes it is a slender conjecture; for as honourable howses and of as great antiquytye have borne as mean armes as Chaucer, and yet Chaucer's armes are not so mean eyther for colour, chardge, or particion, as some will make them." If indeed the fact of Chaucer's residence in the Temple could be proved, instead of resting on mere rumour, it would be tolerable evidence of his high birth and fortune; for only young men of that description were anciently admitted to the inns of court. But unfortunately for the claims of the Inner Temple to the honour of Chaucer's residence, Mr. Thynne declares "it most certaine to be gathered by cyrcumstances of recordes, that the lawyers were not of the Temple till the latter parte of the reygne of Edw. III., at which tyme Chaucer was a grave manne, holden in greate credyt, and employed in embassye."

+ Catherine was the widow of Sir John Swinford, and daughter of Payne de Rouet, king at arms to the province of Guienne. It appears from other evidence, however, that Chaucer's wife's name was Philippa Pykard. Mr. Tyrwhitt explains the circumstance of the sisters having different names, by supposing that the father and

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who was first the mistress, and ultimately the wife of John of Gaunt.

By this connexion Chaucer acquired the powerful support of the Lancastrian family; and during his life his fortune fluctuated with theirs. Tradition has assigned to him a lodge, near the royal abode of Woodstock, by the park gate, where it is probable that he composed some of his early works; and there are passages in these which strikingly coincide with the scenery of his supposed habitation. There is also reason to presume that he accompanied his warlike monarch to France in the year 1359; and from the record of his evidence in a military court, which has been lately discovered, we find that he gave testimony to a fact which he witnessed in that kingdom in the capacity of a soldier*. But the expedition of that year, which ended in the peace of Bretigné, gave little opportunity of seeing military service; and he certainly never resumed the profession of

arms.

In the year 1367 he received from Edward III. a pension of twenty marks per annum, a sum which in those times might probably be equivalent to two or three hundred pounds at the present day. In the patent for this annuity he is styled by the king valettus noster. The name valettus was given to young men of the highest quality before they were knighted, though not as a badge of service. Chaucer, however, at the date of this pension, was not a young man, being then in his thirty-ninth year. He did not acquire the title of scutifer, or esquire, till five years after, when he was appointed joint envoy to Genoa with Sir James Pronan and Sir John de Mari. It has been conjectured, that after finishing the business of this mission he paid a reverential visit to Petrarch, who was that year at Padua†.

his eldest daughter Catherine might bear the name of De Rouet, from some estate in their possession; while the family name Pykard was retained by the younger daughter Philippa, who was Chaucer's wife.

* [Chaucer was made prisoner at the siege of Retters, in France, in 1359, as appears from his depositions in the famous controversy between Lord Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor upon the right to bear the shield 'azure a bend or,' which had been assumed by Grosvenor, and which after a long suit he was obliged to discontinue. The roll of the depositions is in the Tower, and was printed in 1832, by Sir N. Harris Nicolas (2 vols. folio.) See also, Quarterly Review, No. cxi.]

+ Mr. Tyrwhitt is upon the whole inclined to doubt of this poetical meeting; and De Sade, who, in his Mémoires pour la Vie de Petrarque, conceived he should be able to

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The fact, however, of an interview, so pleasing to the imagination, rests upon no certain evidence; nor are there even satisfactory proofs that he ever went on his Italian embassy.

His genius and connexions seem to have kept | him in prosperity during the whole of Edward III.'s reign, and during the period of John of Gaunt's influence in the succeeding one. From Edward he had a grant of a pitcher of wine a day, in 1374, and was made comptroller of the small customs of wool and of the small customs of wine in the port of London. In the next year the king granted him the wardship of Sir Simon Staplegate's heir, for which he received £104. The following year he received some forfeited wool to the value of £71. 4s. 6d.-sums probably equal in effective value to twenty times their modern denomination. In the last year of Edward he was appointed joint envoy to France with Sir Guichard Dangle and Sir Richard Stan, or Sturrey, to treat of a marriage between Richard Prince of Wales and the daughter of the French king. His circumstances during this middle part of his life must have been honourable and opulent; and they enabled him, as he tells us in his Testament of Love, to maintain a plentiful hospitality; but the picture of his fortunes was sadly reversed by the decline of John of Gaunt's influence at the court of Richard II., but more immediately by the poet's connexion with an obnoxious political party in the city. This faction, whose resistance to an arbitary court was dignified with the name of a rebellion, was headed by John of Northampton, or Comberton, who in religious tenets was connected with the followers of Wickliffe, and in political interests with the Duke of Lancaster; a connexion which accounts for Chaucer having been implicated in the business. His pension, it is true, was renewed under Richard; and an addi

prove that it took place, did not live to fulfil his promise. The circumstance which, taken collaterally with the fact of Chaucer's appointment to go to Italy, has been considered as giving the strongest probability to the English poet's having visited Petrarch, is that Chaucer makes one of the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales declare, that he learned his story from the worthy clerk of Padua. The story is that of Patient Grisilde; which, in fact, originally belonged to Boccaccio, and was only translated into Latin by Petrarch. It is not easy to explain, as Mr. Tyrwhitt remarks, why Chaucer should have proclaimed his obligation to Petrarch, while he really owed it to Boccaccio. According to Mr. Godwin, it was to have an occasion of boasting of his friendship with the Italian laureat. But why does he not boast of it in his own person? He makes the clerk of Oxford declare that he had his story from the clerk of Padua ; but he does not say that he had it himself from that quarter. Mr. Godwin, however, believes that he shadows forth himself under the character of the lean scholar.

This is surely improbable; when the poet in another place describes himself as round and jolly, while the poor Oxford scholar is lank and meagre. If Chaucer really was corpulent, it was indeed giving but a shadow of himself to paint his figure as very lean: but why should he give himself a double existence, and describe both the jolly substance and the meagre shadow?

tional allowance of twenty marks per annum was made to him in lieu of his daily pitcher of wine. He was also continued in his office of comptroller, and allowed to execute it by deputy, at a time when there is every reason to believe that he must have been in exile. It is certain, however, that he was compelled to fly from the kingdom on account of his political connexions; and retired first to Hainault, then to France, and finally to Zealand. He returned to England, but was arrested and committed to prison. The coincidence of the time of his severest usage with that of the Duke of Gloucester's power, has led to a fair supposition that that usurper was personally a greater enemy to the poet than King Richard himself, whose disposition towards him might have been softened by the good offices of Anne of Bohemia, a princess never mentioned by Chaucer but in terms of the warmest panegyric.

While he was abroad, his circumstances had been impoverished by his liberality to some of his fellow fugitives; and his effects at home had been cruelly embezzled by those entrusted with their management, who endeavoured, as he tells us, to make him perish for absolute want.

In 1388, while yet a prisoner, he was obliged to dispose of his two pensions, which were all the resources now left to him by his persecutors. As the price of his release from imprisonment, he was obliged to make a confession respecting the late conspiracy. It is not known what he revealed; certainly nothing to the prejudice of John of Gaunt, since that prince continued to be his friend. To his acknowledged partisans, who had betrayed and tried to starve him during his banishment, he owed no fidelity. It is true, that extorted evidence is one of the last ransoms which a noble mind would wish to pay for liberty; but before we blame Chaucer for making any confession, we should consider how fair and easy the lessons of uncapitulating fortitude may appear on the outside of a prison, and yet how hard it may be to read them by the light of a dungeon. As far as dates can be guessed at in so obscure a transaction, his liberation took place after Richard had shaken off the domineering party of Gloucester, and had begun to act for himself. Chaucer's political errors-and he considered his share in the late conspiracy as errors of judgment, though not of intention-had been committed while Richard was a minor, and the acknowledgment of them might seem less humiliating when made to the monarch himself, than to an usurping faction ruling in his name. He was charged too, by his loyalty, to make certain disclosures important to the peace of the kingdom; and his duty as a subject, independent of personal considerations, might well be put in competition with ties to associates already broken by their treachery*.

For my trothe and my conscience," he says in his Testament of Love, "bene witnesse to me bothe, that

While in prison, he began a prose work entitled The Testament of Love, in order to beguile the tedium of a confinement, which made every hour, he says, appear to him a hundred winters; and he seems to have published it to allay the obloquy attendant on his misfortunes, as an explanation of his past conduct. It is an allegory, in imitation of Boethius's Consolations of Philosophy; an universal favourite in the early literature of Europe. Never was an obscure affair conveyed in a more obscure apology; yet amidst the gloom of allegory and lamentation, the vanity of the poet sufficiently breaks out. is the goddess of Love who visits him in his confinement, and accosts him as her own immortal bard. He descants to her on his own misfortunes, on the politics of London, and on his devotion to the Lady Marguerite, or pearl, whom he found in a mussel shell, and who turns out at last to mean the spiritual comfort of the Church.

It

In 1389 the Duke of Lancaster returned from Spain, and he had once more a steady protector. In that year he was appointed clerk of the works at Westminster, and in the following year clerk of those at Windsor, with a salary of £36 per annum. His resignation of those offices, which it does not appear he held for more than twenty months, brings us to the sixty-fourth year of his age, when he retired to the country, most probably to Woodstock, and there composed his immortal Canterbury Tales, amidst the scenes which had inspired his youthful genius.

In 1394 a pension of £20 a year was granted to him, and in the last year of Richard's reign he had a grant of a yearly tun of wine; we may suppose in lieu of the daily pitcher, which had been stopped during his misfortunes.

Tradition assigns to our poet a residence in his old age at Donnington Castle, near Newbury, in Berkshire; to which he must have moved in 1397, if he ever possessed that mansion: but Mr. Grose, who affirms that he purchased Donnington Castle in that year, has neglected to show the documents of such a purchase. One of the most curious particulars in the latter part of his life is the patent of protection granted to Chaucer in the year 1398, which his former inaccurate biographers had placed in the second year of Richard, till Mr. Tyrwhitt corrected the mistaken date. The deed has been generally supposed to refer to the poet's creditors; as it purports, however, to protect him contra æmulos ruos, the expression has led Mr. Godwin to question its having any relation to his debtors and creditors. It is true that rivals or competitors this knowing sothe have I saide for troathe of my leigisunce by which I was charged on my kinges behalfe."

• Mr. Todd has given, in his Illustrations, some poems supposed to be written by Chaucer during his imprisonment: in which, in the same allegorical manner, under the praises of Spring, he appears to implore the assistance of Vere, Earl of Oxford, the principal favourite of Richard IL

are not the most obvious designation for the creditors of a great poet; but still, as the law delights in fictions, and as the writ for securing a debtor exhibits at this day such figurative personages as John Doe and Richard Roe, the form of protection might in those times have been equally metaphorical; nor, as a legal metonymy, are the terms rival and competitor by any means inexpressive of that interesting relation which subsists between the dun and the fugitive; a relation which in all ages has excited the warmest emulation, and the promptest ingenuity of the human mind. Within a year and a half from the date of this protection, Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt, ascended the throne of England by the title of Henry IV.

It is creditable to the memory of that prince, that, however basely he abandoned so many of his father's friends, he did not suffer the poetical ornament of the age to be depressed by the revolution. Chaucer's annuity and pipe of wine were continued under the new reign, and an additional pension of forty marks a year was conferred upon him. But the poet did not long enjoy this accession to his fortune. He died in London, on the twenty-fifth of October, 1400, and was interred in the south cross aisle of Westminster Abbey. The monument to his memory was erected a century and a half after his decease, by a warm admirer of his genius, Nicholas Brigham, a gentleman of Oxford. It stands at the north end of a recess formed by four obtuse foliated arches, and is a plain altar with three quatrefoils and the same number of shields. Chaucer, in his Treatise of the Astrolabe, mentions his son Lewis, for whom it was composed in 1391, and who was at that time ten years of Whether Sir Thomas Chaucer, who was Speaker of the House of Commons in the reign of Henry IV. was another and elder son of the poet, as many of his biographers have supposed, is a point which has not been distinctly ascertained.

age.

Mr. Tyrwhitt has successfully vindicated Chaucer from the charge brought against him by Verstegan and Skinner, of having adulterated English by vast importations of French words and phrases. If Chaucer had indeed naturalised a multitude of French words by his authority, he might be regarded as a bold innovator, yet the language would have still been indebted to him for enriching it. But such revolutions in languages are not wrought by individuals; and the style of Chaucer will bear a fair comparison with that of his contemporaries, Gower, Wickliffe, and Mandeville. That the polite English of that period should have been highly impregnated with French is little to be wondered at, considering that English was a new language at court, where French had of late been exclusively used, and must have still been habitual*. English

[Dryden has accused Chaucer of introducing Gallicisms into the English language; not aware that French

must, indeed, have been known at court when Chaucer began his poetical career, for he would not have addressed his patrons in a language entirely plebeian; but that it had not been long esteemed of sufficient dignity for a courtly muse appears from Gower's continuing to write French verses, till the example of his great contemporary taught him to polish his native tongue*.

The same intelligent writer, Mr. Tyrwhitt, while he vindicates Chaucer from the imputation of leaving English more full of French than he found it, considers it impossible to ascertain, with any degree of certainty, the exact changes which he produced upon the national style, as we have neither a regular series of authors preceding him, nor authentic copies of their works, nor assurance that they were held as standards by their contemporaries. In spite of this difficulty, Mr. Ellis ventures to consider Chaucer as distinguished from his predecessors by his fondness for an Italian inflexion of words, and by his imitating the characteristics of the poetry of that nation.

He has a double claim to rank as the founder of English poetry, from having been the first to make it the vehicle of spirited representations of life and native manners, and from having been the first great architect of our versification, in giving our language the ten syllable, or heroic measure, which though it may sometimes be found among the lines of more ancient versifiers, evidently comes in only by accident. This measure occurs in the earliest poem that is attributed to himt, The Court of Love, a title borrowed from the fantastic institutions of that name, where points of casuistry in the tender passion were debated and decided by persons of both sexes. It is a dream, in which the poet fancies himself taken to the Temple of Love, introduced to a mistress, and sworn to observe the statutes of the amatory god. As the earliest work of Chaucer, it interestingly exhibits the successful effort of his youthful hand in erecting

was the language of the Court of England not long before Chaucer's time, and that, far from introducing French phrases into the English tongue, the ancient bard was successfully active in introducing the English as a fashionable dialect, instead of the French, which had, before his time, been the only language of polite literature in England. SIR WALTER SCOTT'S Misc. Prose Works, vol. i. p. 426.]

Mr. Todd, in his Illustrations of Gower and Chaucer, p. 26, observes, that authors, both historical and poetical, in the century after the decease of these poets, in usually coupling their names, place Gower before Chaucer merely as a tribute to his seniority. But though Gower might be an older man than Chaucer, and possibly earlier known as a writer, yet unless it can be proved that he published English poetry before his Confessio Amantis, of which there appears to be no evidence, Chaucer must still claim precedency as the earlier English poet. The Confessio Amantis was published in the sixteenth year of Richard II.'s reign, at which time Chaucer had written all his poems except the Canterbury Tales.

Written, as some lines in the piece import, at the age of nineteen.

a new and stately fabric of English numbers. As a piece of fancy, it is grotesque and meagre ; but the lines often flow with great harmony.

His story of Troilus and Cresseide was the delight of Sir Philip Sydney; and perhaps, excepting the Canterbury Tales, was, down to the time of Queen Elizabeth, the most popular poem in the English language. It is a story of vast length and almost desolate simplicity, and abounds in all those glorious anachronisms which were then, and so long after, permitted to romantic poetry such as making the son of King Priam read the Thebais of Statius, and the gentlemen of Troy converse about the devil, justs and tournaments, bishops, parliaments, and scholastic divinity.

The languor of the story is, however, relieved by many touches of pathetic beauty. The confession of Cresseide in the scene of felicity, when the poet compares her to the "new abashed nightingale, that stinteth first ere she beginneth sing," is a fine passage, deservedly noticed by Warton. The grief of Troilus after the departure of Cresseide is strongly portrayed in Troilus's soliloquy in his bed.

Where is mine owne ladie, lief, and dere?
Where is her white brest-where is it-where?
Where been her armès, and her iyen clere,
That yesterday this time with me were?
Now may I wepe alone with many a teare,
And graspe about I may; but in this place,
Save a pillowe, I find nought to embrace.

The sensations of Troilus, on coming to the house of his faithless Cresseide, when, instead of finding her returned, he beholds the barred doors and shut windows, giving tokens of her absence, as well as his precipitate departure from the distracting scene, are equally well described.

Therwith whan he was ware, and gan behold
How shet* was every window of the place,
As frost him thought his hertè gan to cold,
For which, with changed deedly palè face,
Withouten worde, he for by gan to pace,
And, as God would, he gan so fastè ride,
That no man his continuance espied.
Than said he thus: O paleis desolate,
O house of houses, whilom best ylight,

O paleis empty and disconsolate,

O thou lanterne of which queint is the light,

O paleis whilom day, that now art night;
Wel oughtest thou to fall and I to die,
Sens‡ she is went, that wont was us to gie§.

The two best of Chaucer's allegories, The Flower and the Leaf, and the House of Fame, have been fortunately perpetuated in our language; the former by Dryden, the latter by Pope. The Flower and the Leaf is an exquisite piece of fairy fancy. With a moral that is just sufficient to apologise for a dream, and yet which sits so lightly on the story as not to abridge its most visionary parts, there is, in the whole scenery and objects of the poem, an air of wonder and sweet

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