defender of Wyclif; Chaucer was of the Duke's party; and the life of Chaucer's supposed friend Clifford adds weight to this evidence for the poet's sympathy with reform. It seems probable that he was Sir Lewis Clifford, somewhat older than Chaucer and a member of the household of the Black Prince. Like the Duke, he was a patron and protector of the Lollards. Froissart praises him as a valiant knight for his jousting in a tournament near Calais; and besides this he was active in diplomatic and domestic affairs. Very interesting is his repentance and the recanting of the Wyclif heresy. In his death-bed will he calls himself God's traitor, and wishes to be buried in the farthest corner of the churchyard. The story of Chaucer's own death-bed repentance, told by Thomas Gascoigne, should not be rejected, thinks Professor Kittredge, without some consideration of "this unquestionably authentic document, which expresses the last wishes of a very gallant and accomplished gentleman." It is further suggested that Chaucer's son, "litell Lowis," was named after this Sir Lewis Clifford. Such are the fleeting glimpses that may be obtained of Chaucer's amusements as well as of the friendships and sterner duties to which his position called him.

In much clearer light stand Chaucer's literary friends and the disciples who carried on his poetic work when he was gone. The moral Gower, who composed poetry in three languages, a man of wealth and position, was chosen by Chaucer as one of his two representatives while he was abroad on diplomatic service in 1378. To him and to the "philosophical Strode," another friend distinguished for his learning, Chaucer dedicates the Troilus. Gower, who outlived Chaucer eight years, pays a compliment in the Confessio Amantis, his long

English poem, to Chaucer as the disciple and poet of Venus herself, for whose sake he has made "dittees" and "songes glade," with which the whole land is filled. Thomas Hoccleve, who, with John Lydgate, tried to continue Chaucer's work, must have been about thirty years old when his master died. His well-known lament is in a singularly affectionate as well as reverent vein. To this disciple the dead poet is not only "flower of eloquence," "universal father in science," "this land's very treasure and richesse," Tully for rhetoric, Aristotle for philosophy, and Virgil in poetry, but also the friend and the patron.

"Alasse! my fadir fro the worlde is goo,
My worthi maister Chaucer, hym I mene!
Be thou advoket for hym, Hevenes Quene !"

Chaucer had good need of friends in the latter part of his life, not to praise his poetry, but to prop his tottering fortunes. 1386 has been noted as the time when his prosperity was at its height; but his party soon went out of power, and he began to lose his appointments. He gave up his house, and sold two of his pensions for ready money. To crown his misfortunes, in 1390 he was twice the victim of highwaymen, who robbed him of the King's money. The kind of friend in need for him was a friend at court; and such was Henry Scogan, who, as we have already seen, was in favor under Henry IV and deemed worthy to read a moral ballad to the young princes; at this earlier date he is asked to say a good word to Richard II :

"Scogan, that knelest at the stremes hede

Of grace, of alle honour, and worthynesse !
In th' ende of which stream I am dull as dede,

Forgete1 in solitarie wildernesse;

Yet, Scogan, thenke on Tullius kyndenesse;
Mynne 2 thy friend ther it may fructifye."

This must have been in 1393; the "end of the stream means Chaucer's enforced residence near Woolwich, while the "stream's head" is the court at Windsor. Another poem of this kind, and probably the last that we have of Chaucer's composition, was addressed to the friendship of royalty itself. Henry IV, who took the kingdom from his cousin Richard in 1399, was the son of Chaucer's old patron John of Gaunt. To him the poet sends The Compleynt of Chaucer to his Purse. This purse Chaucer calls his dear lady, is sorry that it is so light, and unless it be once more heavy, he must die. He yearns to hear the blissful clink within and to see again the gorgeous yellow of the coin. He is shaved, he says, as close as a friar. With this last flicker of his humor goes a very pathetic envoy to the king, whom he calls Conqueror of Albion and Ruler both by his descent and free election. The answer seems to have been prompt, for a new pension was assigned to him in October, 1399. He leased a house in the garden of St. Mary's chapel at Westminster, and for a scant year enjoyed his new prosperity. On October 25, 1400, he died and was buried in Westminster Abbey, first of the long line who have made the Poets' Corner famous.

As for his personal appearance, we have not only his humorous description of himself when his turn comes to narrate in the Canterbury Pilgrim throng, but the portrait which Hoccleve had painted in the manuscript of that poem from which we have already quoted lines of eulogy and affection. Dr. Furnivall describes the face as

1 Forgotten.

2 Make mention of.

"wise and tender, full of a sweet and kindly sadness at first sight, but with much bonhomie in it on a further look, and with deep-set far-looking gray eyes." The moustache is gray, the hair shows white under the black hood; "two tufts of white beard are on the chin." In the Tales Chaucer is described by Harry Bailey the host as shaped in the waist like himself, that is, a very fat man; the poet, moreover, "semeth elvyssh by his contenaunce," in other words, is shy, or like a stranger, in his general bearing, and abstains from familiar talk with the other pilgrims. Portrait and description agree with the character which Chaucer has impressed upon his poetic work. He is above all an observer of men and their ways, an interested, if reticent, spectator of the life about him. He is quite contented with the spectacle and has no mind to peer beyond it into those mysteries in which poets like Milton delight. He takes his stories, his ideas, from the stock of medieval literature, borrowing at will, as was the custom in those days. But his shrewd observations of human nature, his kindly tolerance, and above all his humor, are his own. In a very garrulous age, when long-winded romances and interminable descriptions were the fashion, he contrives to be terse and to the point. No English poet has held so closely to the language of common life.

Chaucer combines the modern and the medieval in what seems to be a startling contrast, until one reflects upon the peculiar conditions of his time. All the traditions of his day were of the Middle Ages, but new ideas and new ideals were in the air. Like Petrarch, he could say of himself that he was set like a sentinel on the confines of two ages and looked both forward and back. He died on the eve of a long and wasting civil war, in which the

literary life in England sank to its lowest ebb; and for a century he remained a pattern to be imitated indeed, but in a hopelessly distant and inferior way. Father of English poetry he remained, no less to Spenser and to Dryden than to Hoccleve himself. To the last-named he was “the first fyndere of our faire langage ;" to Spenser he was "Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled; to Dryden he was "God's Plenty ;" and so great a poet as Keats was content to "stammer where old Chaucer used to sing."