So he found solace and delight, as countless thousands have done, in his Ovid. The world of books and of reading is apt to seem stuffy, the favoured home of the moody spirit, a lair to which a dirty and ragged Magliabechi retreats, a palace where a Beckford gloats solitary over his treasures—a world whence we often desire to escape, since we know we can return to it when we will. For if good books shelter us from the realities of life, life itself refreshes the student like cool rain upon the fevered brow. Chaucer was the bright spirit who let his books fill their proper place in his life. In books, he says—
“I me delyte,
And to hem give I feyth and ful credence,
And in myn heart have hem in reverence
So hertely that ther is game noon
That fro my bokes maketh me to goon.”
Yet books are something much less than life: there is the open air,—the meadows bright with flowers,—the melody of birds,—
“...Whan that the month of May
Is comen, and that I hear the foules singe,
And that the flowers ’ginnen for to spring
Farwel my book....”[457]
§ III
By the end of the fourteenth century we find signs that books more often formed a part of well-to-do households, and that the formal reading and reciting entertainments were giving place gradually to the informal and personal use of books. Among many pieces of evidence that this was so, Chaucer himself furnishes us with two of the best, one in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, and the other in his Troilus and Criseide. The Wife took for her fifth husband, “God his soule blesse,” a clerk of Oxenford—
“He was, I trowe, a twenty winter old,
And I was fourty, if I shal seye sooth.”
Joly Jankin, as the clerk was called,
“Hadde a book that gladly, night and day,
For his desport he wolde rede alway.