1856.] on Chaucer y his Age and Works. 251 



nearly equally disastrous to the invaders and the invaded ; pestilence 

 and famine paged the heels of the English host, and no crowning 

 victory like Crecy compensated for the loss and discredit of the 

 expedition. Chaucer himself became for a while the inmate of a 

 French prison. He was released at the Peace of Bretigny, or 

 Chartres, in the following year. 



From the internal evidence of his writings it is probable that 

 the trade of war was not much to his taste. Neither the Norman- 

 French poets, from whom he borrowed so largely in his earlier 

 writings, nor the romance writers of the 12th and 13th centuries, 

 imparted to him their Homeric fondness for stricken fields and 

 blazing towns. Complying, indeed, with the customs of literature 

 as he found them established, he occasionally describes passages of 

 arms, and the gests and graces of the tournament. But he does 

 not dwell with any zest upon such themes, and forsakes them wil- 

 lingly for more peaceful subjects. Like Horace, he left to more 

 ambitious bards the spirit-stirring drum and the ear-piercing fife. 

 He was, and doubtless knew himself to be, the poet of nature and 

 her aspects ; of man and social life ; of the foibles and virtues of 

 his age. When he compliments his patrons in what may be termed 

 his laureate productions, he takes for his topics of congratulation or 

 condolence a courtship or a marriage, the loss of royal favour, or a 

 death. Their achievements in Poitou and Picardy are uncelebrated 

 by him. 



Yet that during his brief military career Chaucer was no idle 

 or incurious observer of the life in camps, appears throughout the 

 " Knight's Tale," and many passages in his other writings, wherein 

 both the ardour of battle and its image, the tournament, are aptly 

 delineated. The description of the preparation for combat in 

 the lists is worthy to stand very near Shakspeare's better known 

 description of the eve of battle. Compare Chaucer's " Knighte's 

 Tale"— 



** And on the morwe whan the day gan spryng 

 Of hors and hameis, noyse and clateryng." 



with Shakspeare's Henry V. Act iv. Chorus. 



A scholar. — From an allusion in one of his early poems* it has 

 been inferred that Chaucer was educated at Cambridge. Leland, 

 who had good sources of information, says that he was of Oxford, 

 and that he finished his studies at Paris. It is not impossible that 

 each of these universities may in its turn have enrolled the name of 

 Chaucer on its boards. At a time when colleges were little more 

 than grammar-schools it was not unusual for students to migrate 

 from one university to another, in quest of knowledge or attracted 



• Court of Love. — '* My name, alas ! my herte why makes thou straunge, 

 Philogonet I call'd am far and neere 

 Of Cambridge clerk," &c. 



