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11 
GLIMPSES INTO THE 14th CENTURY THROUGH 
THE EYES OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 
(Illustrated with Lantern Views.) 
By Rev. THOMAS LEYLAND. February 2nd, 1892. 
Having lived through the greater part of the fourteenth 
century, Geoffrey Chaucer must have noticed a great deal, and 
being an observing man and a poet withal, we may obtain not a 
few interesting and important glimpses of that period in which, 
retiring man though he was, he played a not unimportant part. 
Schooled as he was at either St. Paul’s or St. Anthony’s, neither 
of them being far from Thames Street, where he lived as a boy, 
his eyes would be early opened to the life of the London of his 
day. Whether he went on to Cambridge or Oxford is very 
doubtful, although in the poem of ‘‘ The Court of Love,’’ Chaucer 
is made to exclaim : 
‘* Philogenet I call’d am far and near, 
Of Cambridge clerk.” 
At one time in his life he occupied a tenement in Aldgate, the 
lease thereof being still in existence, but the district is vastly 
changed, or he would never have called, as he did, ‘‘dear and 
sweet city of London.’ At another period he lived with John of 
Gaunt in the beautiful Savoy Palace, where he was ‘ courteous, 
lowly and serviceable,” and, entering the service of the King, he 
went to France, where he was for a time a prisoner. Here he 
obtained a liking for French poetry, and this, conjoined with 
love of another kind led to his writing of poetry in English, 
giving to the world his interpretation of things as he read about 
them and as he saw them for himself, in the ‘‘ Romance of the 
Rose.” 
Coming under Italian influences, through the writings of 
Petrarch and Boccacio, he finds a new fount of inspiration, but 
he is always the English Chaucer, toning the joyousness of 
Italian story with his native seriousness. His ‘“ Troilus and 
Cressida ’’ now appears, then he is influenced, but not dominated 
by Dante, for he is a prosaic Member of Parliament, doing 
occasional foreign service, yet always catching the manners of 
the people as they rise, and jotting them down on his tablets for 
the world to wonder at, when his work shall take its form and 
life in the growing ‘‘ Pilgrimage.” Richard the Second is King 
of England when Chaucer ascends the throne of English 
Literature, to hold ‘‘as ’twere, the mirror up to nature,” and to 
photograph the very life of the English people. 
