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ILLUSTRATIONS

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

WALTER RALEGH

From the portrait by Zucchero in the National Portrait Gallery

Frontispiece

22

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From the Droeshout Portrait, used as the frontispiece of the
First Folio Edition, 1623.

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From the portrait by Jonathan Richardson in 1732, in the possession of Mrs. James T. Fields.

SIR WALTER SCOTT.

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In 1820. After the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A., in the Royal Gallery, Windsor Castle.

LORD BYRON

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After the engraving by Finden, from the painting by G. Sanders in 1807.

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UNIVERSITY

OF

CALIFORME

GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

GEOFFREY CHAUCER is rightly called the father of English poetry. There were English poets before him, but the language which they spoke and wrote needs to be studied by their descendants of to-day as if it were a foreign tongue. The great chasm of the Conquest sunders these Old English or Anglo-Saxon poets from Chaucer's time; except in scattered dialects English literature had ceased as a national institution. The period covered by Chaucer's life witnessed the birth of a new English nation and a new English language. Of this new nation Chaucer is a worthy representative, and indeed by the last years of his century he was the greatest poet in Europe; by writing in English, moreover, he established the traditions of our standard or literary speech, which has been, with few changes, the dialect of London and the Thames valley. By his persistent use of English Chaucer showed his profound appreciation of the forces which were at work about him. In 1300 French had been deliberately chosen as the language which the people at large would best understand; in 1362, when the poet was barely twenty years of age, a famous statute provided that all pleas in the courts should be carried on in English, because French was no longer known by the average client. By 1385, says a chronicler of the time, even the gentry were neglecting to teach their children French. Once more, too, national

feeling was English, and the wars with France served to weld the nation into patriotic unity. The common people asserted themselves more and more; Parliament acquired new power and significance; and in many ways the England of modern times may be said to date from this fourteenth century.

Chaucer was born in London, perhaps on Thames Street, about the year 1340. The name indicates Norman extraction, but the family had evidently been settled in England for some time. John Chaucer, the father, was a vintner, a wine merchant; but this calling, like that of the great English brewer of modern times, was not regarded as a bar to aristocratic pretensions. Indeed, the merchant class generally had pushed to the front, and were of great importance in English life. While we have no exact information about Chaucer's father, we may rightly assume what his station and privileges were from the case of another vintner, Lewis Johan, a Welshman who acquired the rights of a London citizen and whom Professor Kittredge has recently established as a city-friend of the poet himself. It was at supper in his house that Henry Scogan read the Moral Balade, against foolish waste of time and in praise of virtue and godliness, to the Prince of Wales, Shakespeare's Prince Hal, and his three brothers, Clarence, Bedford, and Gloucester, sons of Henry IV. Professor Kittredge infers that Lewis Johan was a vintner, "and that he kept a restaurant, a fourteenth-century Sherry's, at which young men of the highest rank were accustomed to dine." We find Johan, along with others, presenting a large bill for wine furnished to the King; moreover, like the goldsmiths, wealthy vintners were engaged in banking; and in 1414 Johan obtained for

three years exclusive privileges of issuing bills of exchange for the Court of Rome, the Republic of Venice, and elsewhere. In 1422 he" asked to be relieved of the office of Master of the Coinage in the tower of London." Such a combination of city and court interests we may assume for Chaucer's father, accounting thus for the poet's range of sympathies.

Thus Chaucer himself, though not on a footing with nobility, was early received at court. It is true that he became the aristocratic poet of his time and country, leaving to a wandering priest like Langland the task of speaking for the common man, the ploughman and laborer; but he was not spoiled by his associations; he was interested in all classes of society, and, like Tennyson, he warned his readers that to be "descended out of old richesse" is not enough for "gentil" men. 66 Whoso," he says, "tries most

To do the gentil dedes that he kan,

Taak hym for the grettest gentil man."

Allowing for the objective and conventional in these lines, one must nevertheless credit Chaucer with their sentiment, just as in dealing with the Church he sunders so rigorously the hypocrites and time-servers from the followers of Christ. On the whole, Chaucer's attitude, while distinctly sympathetic with the higher classes, is not that of a man who is fettered by the prejudices of his birth.

The poet's career followed the traditions of his family. His grandfather, Robert le Chaucer, had been a collector of the Port of London in 1310, and left an estate in lands. The father, besides inheriting this property and carrying on his business as a vintner, is

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