136 



CHATTERTON 



CHAUCER 



For eighty years the Rowley controversy was 

 waged with no less bitterness than ignorance, the 

 Rowleyans including Jacob Bryant ( 1781 ), Dean 

 Milles (1782), and Dr S. R. Maitland (1857); the 

 anti-Rowleyans, Tyrwhitt (1777-82) and Warton 

 (1778-82). The subject was once and for ever 

 laid to rest by Professor Skeat in his edition of 

 Chatterton's Poetical Works (2vols. 1875). Vol. i. 

 contains Chatterton's acknowledged poems, 78 in 

 number ; vol. ii. the 43 Rowley poems, with an 

 essay thereon by the editor. Almost unconsciously 

 the learned professor establishes Chatterton's won- 

 drous originality. Theft from an unknown poet ? 

 there is not ' the slightest indication that Chatter- 

 ton had ever seen a MS. of early date. ' Indebted- 

 ness to Chaucer ? he had ' read very little of this 

 excellent author. ... If he had really taken pains 

 to read and study Chaucer, or Lydgate, or any old 

 author earlier than the age of Spenser, the Rowley 

 Poems would have been very different. They 

 would then have borne some resemblance to the 

 language of the 15th century, whereas they are 

 rather less like the literature of that period than of 

 any other. . . . The metres are mostly wrong, the 

 rimes are sometimes faulty ; the words [taken 

 mostly from Kersey's Dictionary, and 93 per cent, 

 of them misused] are wrongly coined, or have the 

 wrong number of syllables ; and the phrases often 

 involve anachronisms, or, occasionally, plagiarisms. ' 

 These last from such recent poets as Dryden and 

 Gray from the former of whom he boldly stole the 

 line, ' And tears began to flow ; ' from the latter 

 adapted the conception, ' closed his eyes in endless 

 ( everlasting ) night. ' 



' An owl mangling a poor dead nightingale,' said 

 Coleridge of Dean Milles ; the words apply to many 

 more critics of Chatterton. There are those among 

 them whose patronising praise and commonplace 

 censure enable us to feel how Chatterton was 

 worsted in life's battle, why he blew up the ship 

 sooner than strike his colours. Others there are 

 Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Rossetti whose 

 precious tributes attest the boy-poet's divinity. 

 No man can tell what Chatterton might have done ; 

 what he did do is patent to every one. Had Shake- 

 speare died, or Milton, in his eighteenth year, or 

 even Keats, the world had never heard of their 

 existence. But he, a lad, with chances infinitely 

 less than theirs, had written his name by then so 

 high in Fame's temple, that purblind pilgrims must 

 accept his achievement on hearsay. If he had lived 

 to be famous, the fraud of the ' poet-priest Rowley ' 

 would not, belike, have been more nardly blamed 

 than that of ' Jedediah Cleishbotham. ' As it is, 

 the conscientious critics have found it less difficult 

 to dilate on Chatterton's pride and scepticism, his 

 vices and deceit, nay, on the meteorology of 1770, 

 than to master the difficult Rowleyan dialect, and 

 to gauge the genius of this nursling of medievalism, 

 this harbinger of the Renascence of Wonder, to use 

 Mr T. Watts-Dun ton's definition of the neo-Roman- 

 tic movement. For him it was reserved to point 

 out Chatterton's metrical inventiveness, and his 'un- 

 deniable influence, both as to spirit and as to form, 

 upon the revival in the 19th century of the romantic 

 temper that temper, without which English 

 poetry can scarcely perhaps hold a place at all when 

 challenged in a court of universal criticism. . . . 

 As a youthful poet showing that power of artistic 

 self-effacement which is generally found to be in- 

 compatible with the eager energies of poetic youth 

 . as a producer, that is to say, of work purely 

 artistic and in its highest reaches unadulterated by 

 lyric egotism the author of the Rowley Poems ( if 

 we leave out of consideration the acknowledged 

 poems), however inferior to Keats in point of 

 sheer beauty, stands alongside him in our litera- 

 ture, and stands with him alone.' 



See Mr Watts-Dunton's essay in vol. iii. of Ward's 

 English Poets ( 1880 ) ; Sir Herbert Croft's Love and Mad- 

 ness (1780) ; and Lives of Chatterton by Dix (1837), Sir 

 D. Wilson (1869 ), and Prof. Masson ( 1874 ; new ed. 1900 ). 



Chaucer, GEOFFREY. The date 1328 for 

 Chaucer's birth is now justly rejected as having no 

 authority and being quite incompatible with some 

 ascertained facts of his later life. There can be little 

 doubt he was born in or about 1340. He was the. 

 son of John Chaucer by his second wife Agnes, of 

 unknown surname, a niece of one Hamo de Copton. 

 (His first wife, Joan de Esthalle, was certainly 

 living as late as 1331.) This John Chaucer was 

 son of Robert Chaucer, of Ipswich and London, so 

 that the poet's family can be traced to the etistern 

 counties. John Chaucer was a vintner and a tavern- 

 keeper, and may perhaps be identified with the 

 John Chaucer who was deputy to the king's butler 

 in the port of Southampton in 1348, and 'seems 

 afterwards to have held the same situation in the 

 port of London.' John's house was in Thames 

 Street by Walbrook, at or near the foot of Dow- 

 gate Hill ; and there we may well suppose the 

 future poet was born. 



Of his boyhood we know nothing. There were 

 good schools in London then as now e.g. Paul's 

 Cathedral School and Anthony's, and Chaucer 

 probably was sent to one of them. At a later period 

 the variety and the minuteness of his knowledge 

 are remarkable, and we know that he was an assid- 

 uous student. Likely enough his studious habits 

 were more or less formed and the basis of his know- 

 ledge laid in his early days. It is possible he may 

 have gone to Oxford or to Cambridge, but there is 

 no evidence of value on this point. In his works 

 he shows some acquaintance with both universities ; 

 but this may have been picked up incidentally. 

 What is certain is that in 1357 and 1358 he was a 

 page in the service of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, 

 wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence. From that ser- 

 vice he would seem to have been presently trans- 

 ferred to the king's household. In 1359 he first 

 'bore arms.' He served in the campaign in France 

 in that year a campaign famous for the bitter 

 sufferings which the English army had to endure. 

 Chaucer was taken prisoner at Retiers in Brittany, 

 but was presently ransomed, the king contributing 

 16 towards the required amount. 



And now we lose sight of Chaucer for some eight 

 years. His father died in 1366, and his mother soon 

 after married one Bartholomew Attechapel ; but 

 of Geoffrey no mention has yet been found till 1367, 

 when the king grants him a pension for life, ' or 

 until we shall think it right to make some other 

 order to suit his condition.' He is described as 

 ' dilectus valettus noster ' ( ' our beloved yeoman ' ), 

 and in an Issue Roll as ' unus valettorum camerse 

 regis ' ( ' one of the yeomen of the king's chamber ' ). 

 It seems fairly certain that by this time Chaucer 

 was married. In 1366 one Philippa Chaucer 

 appears amongst the ladies of the queen's bed- 

 chamber, and there is no good reason for doubting 

 that this was the poet's wife. Her maiden name 

 was in all probability Roet. It is commonly sup- 

 posed that she was the daughter of Sir Payne 

 Roet of Hainault and king-ac-arms of Guienne, and 

 so the sister of Katherine who married Sir Hugh 

 Swinford, and afterwards became the mistress and 

 eventually the wife of John of Gaunt. After the 

 queen's death in 1369 she passed into the house- 

 hold in which her sister was such an important 

 figure, and very likely remained there till her death 

 in 1387. She gave birth, it would seem about 1362: 

 or 1363, to Thomas, a noticeable personage in the 

 House of Commons in the following century ; prob- 

 ably to Elizabeth (circa 1365), for whose novitiate- 

 at the Abbey of Barking John of Gaunt paid some 

 50 in 1381, and to Lewis, born in the same year in- 



