twice recorded as discharging public duties, now in connection with the corporation of wine-merchants, and now in affairs of the Court. He is said to have accompanied Edward III to the Continent. Geoffrey began with what we should call domestic service in a royal household. The accounts of Elizabeth, wife of Prince Lionel, son of Edward III, show that in April, 1357, an entire suit of clothes, cloak, "red and black breeches, and shoes," were bought for Geoffrey Chaucer, and cost seven shillings, say about twenty-five dollars of our money. From the same source a gift of two shillings and sixpence say about ten dollars was bestowed upon him the next winter in Yorkshire "for necessaries at Christmas."

How or where he was educated is not a matter of record. He was probably taught to translate Latin into French, and doubtless learned to use the former language as a living tongue. That he could make mistakes in reading it, several passages in his works bear witness, notably in the House of Fame, where " 'pernicibus alis" is translated by "partridge's wings." His knowledge of science, as science was then understood, was fairly extensive, and is best shown by his treatise on the Astrolabe, written in 1391 for "his little son Lowis." Works like this, of course, could be translated in bulk, but there are many scattered references which testify to his general reading. While he took on faith much that to us seems absurd, he could make fun both of scholastic philosophy and of such a treatise as Vinesauf's Poetria, a manual of practical poetics. Attempts to connect him, now with Oxford, now with Cambridge, are idle; like Shakespeare, he probably got his best education from the busy life in which he

shared, the men of talent and achievement whom he met, and, unlike Shakespeare, from his wide and frequent travels. Records of this busy life have been found in abundance, and new discoveries are not out of the question.

Like all young men of his rank, Chaucer took part in the war with France, and was made prisoner there about the age of nineteen. The King paid a large sum toward his ransom. By 1367 he received a yearly pension for life, as one of the yeomen of the King's chamber. At first he may be supposed to have held torches and carried messages, and he is even credited with making the King's bed. But he soon rose to more dignified service with the rank of squire. All these experiences, his stay in France, his taste of war, his association with the King, did more for his own literary work than anything he may have read. War itself was at that time as romantic as war can well be, and, so far as the knights and upper classes were concerned, was carried on with extraordinary courtesy. Edward III was a pattern of the virtues of chivalry, and other monarchs of the day were not to be outdone,-when the Prince of France escaped from his prison in London, the old French King thought it incumbent on himself to cross the channel and take the fugitive's place. Even the humbler men-at-arms caught the infection, and one would like to think that some ballad of the Cheviot fight, or of Otterburne, reached the ears of Chaucer. His two knights, Palamon and Arcite, who fight each other for their lady-love, are not to be outdone in generous and chivalric conduct by the Percy and the Douglas themselves. Arcite, fully armed, finds his rival helpless and without weapon, but will not take

this foul advantage, promising instead to bring fighting gear for battle on the morrow, and bidding his opponent to "choose the best, and leave the worst for me." It was doubtless some humble singer of Chaucer's own day who made the stanza about Percy's noble sorrow:

"The Persë leanyde on his brande,

And sawe the Duglas de;

He tooke the dede mane by the hande,

And sayd, 'Wo ys me for the !'"

It is well to remember that Chaucer could breathe this spirit in English air under Edward III, and to think how different his inspiration would have been from the brutal and degenerate times of Edward IV, a century later. The gallery of portraits in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales not only affords a view of the actual life which Chaucer led, and of the men and women whom he daily met, but gives us some insight into the tastes and preferences of the poet himself. The knight is Chaucer's ideal man in high place; he loves "chivalrie,

"trouthe and honour, fredom and courteisie."

He fights in far-off lands, now for some worthy master and now for the Christian faith. He is kind and considerate to lowly folk as well as to his peers, and in his bearing "meek as a maid." His horse and weapons must be of the best, but his dress is plain. To this pattern of virtue the poet bows with unalloyed respect, and pays compliments as sincere, if more familiar, to the squire. The yeoman is praised as a good archer and forester; the prioress comes in for a little harmless satire, but holds her own in courtesy and refinement. The monk, another aristocrat, has to feel the real sting of the lash, and so has the begging friar. Towards the merchant

Chaucer is somewhat too curt, if not contemptuous, forgetting his name. The lawyer and the doctor are lightly touched; the shipman is called a good fellow and shown to be a pirate. The Oxford scholar gets Chaucer's sincerest and finest tribute of praise. The franklin, or country squire, is treated as an epicure; the parson and his humble brother the ploughman are nobly portrayed in his most sympathetic vein. He finds vulgarity interesting in the Wife of Bath and in the miller, and shows more actual dislike, sturdy Englishman as he is, for the summoner and for the pardoner, tools for the meanest functions of the Church, than for any one else. Amid these various touches of reverence, sympathy, tolerance, disdain, nothing is more striking than Chaucer's appreciation of humble life. Thus in one of the Tales we find the description of a carter, first swearing at his horses as they pull in vain at their load, and then praising them for the final and triumphant struggle.

After serving as page and soldier, Chaucer seems to have been employed mainly in court affairs, and when he was over thirty he was intrusted with diplomatic errands. Beginning with missions to neighboring countries like Flanders, he was at last sent to Italy. Here he came in contact with the best learning and the noblest literature of the time. Whether he met Petrarch and Boccaccio cannot now be known, though it was entirely possible for Chaucer to have met them both; and as the English poet had already made some reputation on the Continent, there is no reason why one should not fancy the great humanist Petrarch conversing with his far-come visitor at Padua in 1373. Chaucer's tribute to Petrarch at the beginning of the Clerk's Tale is couched in terms of the highest eulogy, but

neither implies nor disavows the assumption of personal friendship. His stay in Italy was not long; but he made more than one visit, and came to be master of the language. He learned to admire and use the poems of Dante, whose influence is to be traced in the House of Fame and elsewhere, and especially of Boccaccio, from whom he paraphrased and adapted some of his longest and best poems.

Chaucer was an adherent of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, ambitious younger son of Edward III, and there seems to be good ground for assuming closer relations between the two. As early as 1366 the poet was probably married to one Philippa, a lady of the Queen's chamber, who then received a pension for life. It seems fairly certain that she was the sister of Katharine Swinford, who had been governess to John of Gaunt's daughters, and whom the Duke finally married as his third wife. In any case Chaucer was bound by no ordinary ties to this prince, and the connection must explain many of the favors he received from the court as well as the renewal of bounty which came to him so promptly with the accession of Henry IV, the Duke of Lancaster's son. One of the earliest poems which Chaucer wrote, The Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse, is an elegy on the Duke's first wife, who died in 1369. It shows careful study of French models, but is not without its own force and beauty, though there is no sign of the qualities developed in Chaucer's later work. Another poem, written about this time, The Compleynt unto Pite, which passes as the poet's first original work, and is written in the so-called Chaucerian stanza, is regarded by many scholars as an expression of unrequited love, and is supposed to be "founded on