Learned at Padua of a worthy clerke
Francis Petrarke, the laureate poét:
Highte thys clerke, whose rhethorique sweet
Enlumined al Itale of poesy.
It was during his peregrinations in France and Italy that Chaucer drew at the fountain-head those deep draughts from the Hippocrene of Tuscany and of Provence which flow and sparkle in all his compositions. It is certain that he introduced into the English language an immense quantity of words absolutely and purely French, and that he succeeded with an admirable dexterity in harmonizing the ruder sounds of his vernacular tongue; so successfully, indeed, that it may be safely asserted that very few poets in any modern language are more exquisitely and uniformly musical than Chaucer. Indeed, he has been accused, and in rather severe terms, of having naturalized in English “a wagon-load of foreign words.”
In 1380 we find Chaucer appointed to the office of Clerk of the Works at Windsor, where he was charged with overlooking the repairs about to be made in St. George’s Chapel, then in a ruinous condition.
In 1383 Wickliffe completed his translation into the English language of the Bible, and his death, in the following year, seems to have been the signal for the commencement of a new and gloomy phase in the fortunes of the poet. Chaucer returned to England in 1386, and, the party to which he belonged having lost its political influence, he was imprisoned in the Tower, and deprived of the places and privileges which had been granted to him. Two years afterward he was permitted to sell his patents, and in 1389 he appears to have been induced to abandon, and even to accuse, his former associates, of whose treachery toward him he bitterly complains.
In reward for this submission to the government, we afterward find him restored to favor, and made, in the year 1389, Clerk of the Works at Westminster. It is at this period that he is supposed to have retired to pass the calm evening of his active life in the green shades of Woodstock, where he is related to have composed his admirable “Canterbury Tales.” This production, though, according to many opinions, neither the finest nor even the most characteristic of Chaucer’s numerous and splendid poems, is yet the one of them all by which he is now best known: it is the work which has handed his name down to future generations as the earliest glory of his country’s literature; and as such it warrants us in appealing, from the perhaps partial judgments of isolated critics, to the sovereign tribunal of posterity. The decisions of contemporaries may be swayed by fashion and prejudice; the criticism of scholars may be tinged with partiality; but the unanimous voice of four hundred and fifty years is sure to be a true index of the relative value of a work of genius.
Beautiful as are many of his other productions, it is the “Canterbury Tales” which have enshrined Chaucer in the penetralia of England’s Glory Temple; it is to the wit, the pathos, the humanity, the chivalry of those tales that our minds recur when our ear is struck with the venerable name of Chaucer. In 1390 we find the poet receiving the honorable charge of Clerk of the Works at Windsor; and, two years later, a grant from the crown of 20l. and a tun of wine annually. Toward the end of the century which his illustrious name had adorned, he appears to have fallen into some distress; for another document is in existence securing to the poet the protection of the crown (probably against importunate creditors;) and in 1399 we find the poet’s name inserted in the lease of a house holden from the Abbot and Chapter of Westminster, and occupying the spot upon which was afterward erected Henry VII.’s chapel, now forming one of the most brilliant ornaments of Westminster Abbey. In this house, as is with great probability conjectured, Chaucer died, on the 25th of October, 1400, and was buried in the Abbey, being the first of that long array of mighty poets whose bones repose with generations of kings, warriors, and statesmen, beneath the “long-drawn aisles.”
In reading the works of this poet the qualities which cannot fail to strike us most are—admirable truth, freshness, and livingness of his descriptions of external nature; profound knowledge of human life in the delineation of character; and that all-embracing humanity of heart which makes him, as it makes the reader, sympathise with all God’s creation, taking away from his humor every taste of bitterness and sarcasm. This humor, colored by and springing from universal sympathy, this noblest humanity—we mean humanity in the sense of Terence’s: “homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto”—is the heritage of only the greatest among mankind; and is but an example of that deep truth which Nature herself has taught us, when she placed in the human heart the spring of Laughter fast by the fountain of Tears.