Two undertakings of more than ordinary importance mark the second half of the fourteenth century, and suggest on various grounds an interesting and useful parallel. Pursuing one of these undertakings, the chief actor in it collected vast sums of treasure by the taxation of the people of England, drew from the peaceful and profitable avocations of industry the materials for army after army of English citizens, and poured them upon the soil of a neighbouring country, which he was determined at all costs to conquer. To found for England a new empire on the Continent, was the undertaking on which the brave, able, accomplished, but grasping and unscrupulous Edward III. concentrated the energies of a life. About the very same time that Edward began in earnest to prosecute this undertaking, there was a youth, buried in the seclusion of study, not less actively engaged in the promotion of another undertaking; that—too gigantic in its character probably to be determined upon, or even rightly estimated then—was doubtless dawning little by little upon his mind. For this undertaking, he too drew supplies from all quarters, but his levies were of books, his treasure the accumulated stores of thought that time had bequeathed to the world. And when he had mastered all that could thus be obtained, he went forth into the world to study men, as well as man, before he attempted the conquest of the empire he meditated, over the hearts and minds of his fellows. And how fared these respective undertakings? Failures of course affected the ambitious student as well as the ambitious warrior, but we have not in the one case, as in the other, a record of them; let us therefore look simply at the successes of both, and the results. The battle of Creci, the first great encounter between the two nations, was won in 1346, and in the same year the first important poem of the first great English poet is understood to have been produced. Ten years later, Creci had been followed by Poitiers; the 'Court of Love,' by the noble 'Troilus and Cressida;' and by an announcement contained in the concluding lines of that work, which showed the poet had essayed and was satisfied as to his powers, and was preparing to give to England a work that should rival the divine comedy of the illustrious Italian (Dante) lately deceased. "Go, little book," wrote the poet—
"go, little tragedy,
Where God my maker, yet ere that I die.
So send me might to make some comedy."
Sixteen or seventeen years more elapse, and the iron-willed sovereign bends beneath a fiat even more potent than his own, and in deep humiliation feels that he is utterly defeated; about the same time the poet is receiving from the lips of an illustrious contemporary an addition to the materials for the work that is to form the culminating point of his life and fame, the last of a long series of productions destined to be as permanent as the language itself which they have done so much to create, the 'Comedy,' in short, of which he has so long dreamed;—he is hearing from Petrarch the exquisitely pathetic story of Griselda. Edward dies in 1377, a broken-hearted man; deserted, even on his palace-hearth, at the last hour, by those he had fed and clothed and honoured; he who would have conquered France cannot even now command the presence of a single lackey: when Chaucer dies, it is amidst the profound regrets of all who knew him personally or through his works; and as he goes "home" and takes his "wages," it is with the conviction that he has indeed done his "worldly task," in the foundation of what, all things considered, it is no national vanity to call the mightiest of Literatures. The parallel we have thus ventured to draw does not even end here. Whilst we still drink refreshing draughts from Chaucer's "well of English undefiled," and wonder to see how little of essentially differing qualities his greatest successors have infused into the national literature, the only effect, if there be any one now perceptible, of Edward's unjust attempt, or of his brilliant victories, is in the unhappy jealousy which these and similar events have left in the minds of the people who most suffered from them. Truly if the sword in its day is honoured at the expense of the pen, the pen in the long run repays itself with sweeping interest. We have said nothing in these remarks of the connexion between the two personages whose respective undertakings we have placed in juxtaposition with each other, but that connexion is not the least interesting or least important portion of the biography of either: we do not know whether Edward intentionally forwarded Chaucer's poetical undertakings, but it is clear that by his patronage they were forwarded—and greatly; whilst Chaucer, on the other hand, was one of the most trusted and valued of the king's servants; promoting Edward's views by his personal services in the field as a soldier, and still more influentially by his experience and wisdom in the cabinet as a diplomatist.
It is a curious though a very common characteristic of certain biographers, in dealing with cases where information is as desirable as it is meagre, to make the little less, by throwing all sorts of doubts upon the facts that we thought had been settled and realized. They have, in short, a horror of all speculations but those which may tend to disturb existing beliefs. Unable to build themselves, they would deny to others the use of the necessary foundations. Why, for instance, must there be a doubt excited as to the date of Chaucer's birth? Most of the old writers say it took place in the second year of the reign of Edward III., 1328, and their statement is supported by a host of indirect evidences, which show that it must have been about the time they mention. But it is urged, that when Chaucer, in 1386, gave his deposition in the controversy between Lord Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor relative to the right of using a certain coat-of-arms (an important part of Chaucer's biography, to which we shall subsequently refer), he described himself "of the age of forty and upwards," and as having borne arms for twenty-seven years. Do the doubters therefore abide by their own necessary inference that he was born in 1345, and became a soldier at the ripe age of thirteen? Not a whit; they acknowledge that such a date cannot be correct; it has even been pointed out that other persons who were examined at the same time are known to have been from ten to twenty years older than the depositions make them. Whatever, therefore, the explanation of the phrase "forty and upwards," it is clear that it is not to be received in contradiction of the date that makes the poet to have been in his fifty-fifth year. Yet the doubt is raised just the same! So again as to the place of Chaucer's birth. In his prose work, the 'Testament of Love,' where the poet is as evidently and avowedly referring to himself as poet well can, he speaks of the City of London that is "to me so dear and sweet, in which I was forth grown; and more kindly love have I to that place, than to any other in earth; as every kindly creature hath full appetite to that place of his kindly engendure, and to wiln [wish] rest and peace in that stead [place] to abide." But then as some biographers have mistaken various other passages in that work, this passage also is to be doubted, nay, the whole production laid aside as one that cannot be relied on. It is true, that for a comprehensive and trustworthy Life of Chaucer greater care must be shown in the use of the somewhat perplexing materials that wait the biographer's disposal than ever yet has been shown, but it is not by a system of wholesale negation that the work will be accomplished. Nothing can come of nothing, and, trite as the observation may be, there are some few for whom it still seems requisite to be asserted. Not simply useless, but mischievous, is that kind of biography which delights to reduce what at all events looks like flesh and blood to a pure skeleton, and has no objection to take away even a bone or two from that.
Chaucer then was born in 1328, in London; and there doubtless he spent his earliest years, until, as he says, he was "forth-grown." Of his parents we know nothing direct. A long list of persons has been collected, who during the period in question bore the name of Chaucer, which was derived from the old Norman word Chaucier or Chaussier, signifying a shoemaker; and used in that sense during the poet's life by Richard of Hampole, a hermit, who translated the Gospel of St. Mark, and died in 1394. The passage, "There cometh one mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose," is thus rendered by Richard: "A stalworthier man than I shall come after me, of whom I am not worthy, downfalling or kneeling, to loose the thong of his chawcers." But that the poet's parents were certainly persons of wealth, probably also of consideration, may be assumed from the excellence of the education given to their son, and from the ready access which he found, on entering into public life, to the very person and favour of the sovereign. Chaucer, in a word, was born a gentleman; and the fact is of importance, not only for the incalculable benefit that it involved through the instrumentality of that education, but as showing us still more plainly than otherwise could have been shown the true nobility of the poet's mind. It is Chaucer who tells us, in the 'Wife of Bath's' tale, that he who ever intendeth to perform all kinds of gentle deeds is the greatest gentleman, and that he who will perform none of them—
"He is not gentle, be he duke or earl;"
and that the poet here speaks his own sentiments, while relating the sentiments of the knight's apparently aged and hideous bride, is clear from his ballad on the same subject, where it is inculcated that unless a man love virtue and fly vice,
"He is not gentle, though he riche seem,
All wear he mitre, crown, or diademe."
Where Chaucer was educated is uncertain; but the assertions of the older biographers that he was both at Cambridge and Oxford, and that he subsequently went to Paris, then the most famous and flourishing of all the European universities, is supported by the known facts in the lives of other eminent men, who became, like him, distinguished by their scholastic attainments. Grostête, Roger Bacon, and Michael Scott, all pursued the exact route ascribed to Chaucer. The poet is supposed to refer to himself under the designation of "Philogenet of Cambridge, clerk," in the 'Court of Love,' and the indications of a correct knowledge of the locality exhibited in the Reve's Tale are referred to as an additional corroboration of his residence in the neighbourhood. Even the very college is named—Clare Hall—at which he studied, and where he may have written his earlier poems, including the 'Court of Love.' Clare Hall, Speght says, is the same with that mentioned in the Reve's Tale, under the denomination of the Soleres or Scholars'. It is to be hoped the licentious freaks of the scholars, as described in that tale, are not to be received as characteristic of the order at the period that Chaucer was a member.
Two of Chaucer's most intimate friends appear to have been the "moral Gower" and the "philosophical Strode," whose names he has thus embalmed in his verse; and both were members of the University of Oxford at the time that all three must have been engaged in the business of mental culture. To them he dedicated his 'Troilus and Cressida;' and the poem itself, which is said to have been written at Oxford, may have been composed while in the daily enjoyment of their society. But whether it was Oxford, or some other place, that the poet left at the termination of his English academical studies, we may rest assured that Leland was essentially correct in his general statement when he wrote, "At the period of his leaving Oxford, he was already an acute dialectician, a persuasive orator, an eloquent poet, a grave philosopher, an able mathematician, and an accomplished divine. These no doubt are lofty appellations; but whoever shall examine his works with a curious eye, will admit that I have sufficient ground for my panegyric." But the touches of the "finishing school," it appears, from the same authority, were still requisite, and were obtained. Chaucer went to Paris, where "he imbibed all the beauties, elegance, charms, wit, and grace of the French tongue, to a degree that is scarcely credible." And thus accomplished, and possessing a handsome person, which must have been trained and developed into strength and activity by martial exercises, the young poet returned to England, and prepared to enter into the ordinary business of life, from which alone, it is probable, he thenceforward derived his chief or entire support. At first he entered into the study of the law, and became a member of the Inner Temple; but the only result was, an affair in which he became subject to the law, instead of an expounder of it. Some friar having offended the poet in Fleet Street, he is said to have given him a beating, and to have been fined five shillings for the offence. But it was not in the time of the Third Edward that a young ambitious man, in the possession of all that nature could possibly confer upon her greatest favourites—whether of personal or mental advantages, and whose acquisitions were as remarkable as his endowments,—it was not then such a man could shut himself up in the dusty solitudes of the Temple chambers, and pore over legal treatises from morn to noon—from noon to dewy eve. It was not the moths of fashion that the dazzling radiance of the court of King Edward attracted, but England's bravest and ablest men, her noblest and most virtuous women, whose beauty, however conspicuous, formed the least of their qualifications. It was with such as these that the palace halls of Windsor were thronged. To mention but two names, each sufficient to immortalize any court—there were then among the brilliant groups that surrounded Edward, his queen Philippa, the saviour of the illustrious citizens of Calais, and the Countess of Salisbury, the heroine of Froissart's charming narration, who not only resisted the king's unlawful love, but so purified the heart of the lover, that when the well-known accident happened at a ball, he founded the order of the Garter in her eternal honour: an act, all things considered, unequalled for its combination of chivalrous, poetical, and lover-like feeling.
It was among such personages the young poet desired to be, and his wishes were speedily gratified. And it is evident that he was at least as much admired as he could admire, notwithstanding his modest and retiring, if not even reserved habits. A pleasant tradition tells us that the Countess of Pembroke, the king's daughter, one of his patronesses, told him his silence created more mirth than his conversation; for he was very bashful and reserved in company, notwithstanding that life and spirit which appeared in his writings. But Chaucer had no desire to play the courtier—and he was understood. More than one of his poems are believed to have originated in conversations between the poet and the noble women who honoured themselves and him by taking an interest in his career. Thus, to appease them generally, when they professed to be offended by the strictures contained in some of his writings, he produced, at the command of Queen Philippa, 'The Legend of Good Women,' which, it has been pointedly observed, should rather be called 'The Legend of Bad Men.' Lydgate says—