And grate wel Chaucer, when ye mete,
As my disciple and my poéte:
For in the flowers of his youth,
In sundry wise, as he well couthe,
Of ditees and of songés glade
The which he for my sake made, etc.
These lines also prove that Chaucer began early to write; and probably our poet continued during the whole course of his eventful life, to labor assiduously in the fields of letters.
His earliest works were strongly tinctured with the manner, nay, even with the mannerism, of the age. They are much fuller of allegory than his later productions; they are distinguished by a greater parade of scholarship, and by a deeper tinge of that amorous and metaphysical mysticism which pervades the later Provençal poetry, and which reached its highest pitch of fantastical absurdity in the Arrêts d’Amour of Picardy and Languedoc. As an example of this we may cite his “Dream,” an allegorical composition written to celebrate the nuptials of his friend and patron John of Gaunt, with Blanche, the heiress of Lancaster.
Chaucer was in every sense a man of the world: he was the ornament of two of the most brilliant courts in the annals of England—those of Edward III. and his successor Richard II. He also accompanied the former king in his expedition into France, and was taken prisoner about 1359, at the siege of Retters; and in 1367 we find him receiving from the crown a grant of 20 marks, i. e. about 200l. of our present money.
Our poet, thus distinguished as a soldier, as a courtier, and as a scholar, was honored with the duty of forming part of an embassy to the splendid court of Genoa, where he was present at the nuptials of Violante, daughter of Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, with the Duke of Clarence. At this period he made the acquaintance of Petrarch, and probably of Boccaccio also: to the former of these illustrious men he certainly was personally known; for he hints, in his “Canterbury Tales,” his having learned from him the beautiful and pathetic tale of the patient Griselda:—