PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 1071 
These northern writers, however, soon adopted as their own a 
different poetical field—that of the metrical romance. In the 
thirteenth century, French was the language of the courts of 
England, France, Italy, and Germany. 
Chaucer, as a page, soldier, court official, and ambassador, 
would be well acquainted with the poetry of the Troubadours, 
and his first attempts were translations of French lays, like the 
Roman de la Rose. Of this poem it has been aptly remarked : 
“Over a large part of Europe it supplied poets, for a century and 
more, with their chief model for the shaping of an allegory” 
This ‘‘poem which closed in France the literature of the Middle 
Ages, maintained its supremacy until the invention of printing, 
and many editions of it were published in the fifteenth century,” 
The literature of Southern Europe could have been no sealed 
book to Chaucer, whose wife, after the death of Queen Philippa, 
in 1369, was in the service of Constance of Castile, second wife 
of John of Gaunt—Chaucer’s patron. In 1372, and again in 
1378, Chaucer was sent on political missions to Italy. On his first 
journey he visited Genoa and Florence, and on the second visit 
he was accredited to Bernardo Visconti, Lord of Milan, and Sir 
John Hawkwood, the celebrated English captain of free-lances. 
Italy was the last of the Latinised countries to produce an 
independent language and literature. No industry will reveal 
even so much as a few lines of real Italian until the end of the 
twelfth century. In the fourteenth century appeared Dante, 
Petrarch, and Boccacio. To the second of these we owe the 
popularity of the sonnet, and the third is the father of all prose 
fiction. 
Under the influence of the Troubadours Chaucer became a 
poet; under the influence of Dante and his Italian contemp- 
oraries Chaucer became a genius. Of this writer Tyrwhitt 
remarks: “Chaucer is the Homer of his country, not only as 
having been the earliest of her poets, but also as being still one of 
her greatest. The names of Spenser, of Shakespeare, and of 
Milton, are the only other names that can be placed on the same 
line with his.” This statement is only in part correct, and a better 
appreciation of Chaucer’s position is thus stated by John Morley : 
“The genius of Geoffrey Chaucer is not to be likened to a lone 
star glittering down on us through a rift in surrounding darkness, 
or to a spring day in the midst of winter, leaving us to wait long 
for its next fellow. He had in his own time for brother writers, 
Wyclif, Langland, Gower—some of the worthiest men of our race 
—and the light of the English mind was not quenched when he 
died.” 
After the times of Chaucer, and of his contemporaries— Barbour, 
Lydgate, and Gower,—came the long period of unrest following 
the usurpation of Henry IV, and culminating in thirty years of 
