208 CHAUCER. 



placid tenderness. We are struck, too, with the smooth 

 ness of the face as of one who thought easily whose phrase 

 flowed naturally, and who had never puckered his brow 

 over an unmanageable verse. 



Nothing has been added to our knowledge of Chaucer s 

 life since Sir Harris Nicolas, with the help of original 

 records, weeded away the fictions by which the few facts 

 were choked and overshadowed. We might be sorry that 

 no confirmation has been found for the story, fathered on 

 a certain phantasmal Mr. Buckley, that Chaucer was 

 &quot;fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet 

 Street,&quot; if it were only for the alliteration ; but we refuse 

 to give up the meeting with Petrarch. All the probabilities 

 are in its favour. That Chaucer, being at Milan, should 

 not have found occasion to ride across so far as Padua, for 

 the sake of seeing the most famous literary man of the 

 day, is incredible. If Froissart could journey on horse 

 back through Scotland and Wales, surely Chaucer, whose 

 curiosity was as lively as his, might have ventured what 

 would have been a mere pleasure- trip in comparsion. I 

 cannot easily bring myself to believe that he is not giving 

 some touches of his own character in that of the Clerk of 

 Oxford : 



&quot; For him was liefer have at his bed s head 

 A twenty bookes clothed in black and red 

 Of Aristotle and his philosophic 

 Than robes rich, or riddle or psaltrie : 

 But although that he were a philosopher, 

 Yet had he but a little gold in coffer : 

 Of study took he moste care and heed ; 

 Not one word spake he more than was need: 

 All that he spake it was of high prudence, 

 And short and quick, and full of great sentence ; 

 Sounding in moral virtue was his speech, 

 And gladly would he learn and gladly teach.&quot; 



That, himself as plump as Horace, he should have 

 described the Clerk as being lean, will be no objection to 

 those who remember how carefully Chaucer effaces his own 

 personality in his great poem. Our chief debt to Sir Harris 



