Nicholas’s
Life of Chaucer.
*
“There is a third portrait in a copy of the Canterbury Tales made about the reign of King Henry the Fifth, being within twenty years of the poet’s death, in the Lansdowne MS. 851. The figure, which is a small full-length, is placed in the initial letter of the volume. He is dressed in a long gray gown, with red stockings, and black shoes fastened with black sandals round the ankles. His head is bare, and the hair closely cut. In his right hand he holds an open book; and a knife or pencase, as in the other portraits, is attached to his vest.”
Tradition asserts that Chaucer merged his own personality in that of the Poet in his Canterbury Tales.
Prologue to
The Rime of
Sire Thopas.
“... Our Hoste to japen he began,
And than at erst he loked upon me,
And saide thus; ‘What man art thou?’ quod he;
‘Thou lokest, as thou woldest finde an hare,
For ever upon the ground I see thee stare.
‘Approche nere, and loke up merily.