ENGLISH LITERATUBE. 



197 







Gaunt having ooino into power, Chaaoor felt a corresponding 

 reverse of fortune, and lust the office bo had so long held. In 



10 Lancastrian party wore onoe more in the ascendant, 



,\.n appointed to the valuable ollioo of Clerk of the 



King's Works, lint misfortune again overtook him. In about 



two yearn he loMt all the office* which ho had held ; in his 



distress ho was compelled to sell or mortgage the pensions 



had boon conferred upon him from time to time, and 

 which I s.i.l amounted to considerable sums ; and was thus 



1 to very gruut poverty. In this distress he seems to 

 have continued for some years, until in 1394 he received a 

 pension from the king, which was subsequently increased 

 sufficiently to ploco him in comfort. He died on the 25th of 

 . 1 H)0, probably at his house in Westminster, and was 

 buried in Westminster Abbey. 



Not only was Chaucer thus almost throughout his whole life 

 brought into constant and close intercourse with some of the 

 moat eminent political and party leaders of his time, but he 

 also appears to have lived on terms of intimacy with his 

 brother poets and men of letters. Of these, as wo have seen, 

 the greatest was Gower, between whom and Chaucer a close 

 friendship existed. His connection with John of Gaunt, too, 

 brought him within the circle of the groat religious movement 

 brought about by Wiekliffe and his disciples. John of Gaunt 

 was \Vickliffe' s protector, and the Lancastrian party at that 

 time leaned much upon the support of those large classes of the 

 community who, like Wickliffe, rebelled against the dominion 

 and revolted against the corruptions of the regular clergy. 

 Hence we can trace throughout the works of Chaucer in 

 his vigorous, and no doubt somewhat exaggerated, pictures of 

 wealthy and self-indulgent abbots, dissolute monks, and lying 

 pardoners, contrasted with his attractive sketches of the poor 

 and pious parish clergy his sympathy with the movement of 

 the Reformers. 



It will easily be seen that the times in which Chaucer lived 

 and the circumstances of his career were peculiarly favourable 

 for a great and original poet, and especially for one with 

 Chaucer's unrivalled power of catching and reproducing the 

 peculiarities in character and habit of classes of men. Border 

 countries are the favourite ground of picturesque writers. 

 Types of character are more strongly marked and more sharply 

 contrasted there than elsewhere. Thus Scott chose for his 

 usual field the border-land between England and Scotland, or 

 the dividing line of highland and lowland. And the age of 

 Chaucer may well be called the border-land between the dark 

 ages and the modern period. In his own great poem he brings 

 together the knight who had fought for the Cross in Prussia 

 with his brethren of the Teutonic order, and the prosperous 

 London merchant and the essentially modern country gentle- 

 man; and this was a true picture of tho times. So in the 

 literature of that age, as we have already seen, the formal and 

 learned Gower and the rough and antique satirist Langlande 

 were alike contemporaries of Chaucer ; while in Italy Petrarch 

 was writing poetry as polished and artistic as any that the 

 world has ever seen. This was just the age in which the genius 

 of Chaucer, with its singular variety of scope, and its power 

 of seizing points of character, would find fullest play ; and 

 Chaucer's varied career was entirely in his favour. As soldier, 

 courtier, scholar, diplomatist, and man of business, he must 

 have had unusual opportunities of studying character and 

 learning the real life of his age. And we find the character 

 of his poetry in this respect just what wo might expect to find 

 it under those circumstances. He has left, in such poems as 

 " The Flower and the Leaf" and "The Court of Love," perfect 

 specimens of the fairyland in which the Troubadours delighted, 

 with all their grace but all their fantastic unreality. But the 

 name poet has left that marvellous photograph from real life, 

 the prologue to the " Canterbury Tales ;" and the genuine and 

 simple pathos of the story of Griselda. The variety of cha- 

 racter in the poetry of Chaucer keeps constantly before our 

 minds that, though he is rightly called the source from which 

 the stream of English poetry takes its rise, that source itself, 

 like the great lake that feeds the Nile, derives its fulness not 

 only from the springs that arise within its bosom, but from 

 the streams whose waters it collects and makes its own. Some 

 of the various channels of literature which converge in the 

 works of Chaucer we have already pointed out in previous 

 lessons, and we shall ask our readers to bear this observation 



in mind when we come to remark upon the poem* of Chaucer 

 singly. 



Before proceeding to consider the poetry of Chaucer ia de- 

 Uil, it is nocesnary to speak very shortly upon matter* which 

 have given rise to much controversy the language in which be 

 wrote, and the principle of versification which ha adopted. 

 Some writer* have treated Chaucer an one who spoiled the 

 purity of the English tongue by the wholesale introduction of 

 French words into it ; while other* have regarded hi* work* a* 

 the most perfect standard of the English spoken in hi* day. 

 The truth appear* to be that in the main Chaucer used the 

 English language a* it was usually spoken and written in hi* 

 day by the aristocracy and among educated men, which would 

 for obvious historical reasons be less purely Saxon and more 

 mixed with French than the language of the lower order*. But 

 it is also beyond doubt that Chaucer, in enlarging the range of 

 ideas which were to be expressed in English poetry, must hare 

 found it necessary at the same time to enlarge it* vocabulary, 

 and that he did so by the adoption of words from the French. 

 And though, many words used by him have since been lost, and 

 many more have been introduced, it ia still tructhat the voca- 

 bulary thus formed is substantially the same a* that now in use. 



With regard to the forms of English words as written by 

 Chaucer, a few points must be borne in mind by tho reader, 

 in order to a thorough understanding of tho author. In its 

 earliest form the Anglo-Saxon English was a language, like 

 the classical Greek and Latin, with a complete system of in* 

 flections forming, for instance, the cases of its noun* by 

 appropriate changes in their termination, instead of by the use 

 of prepositions, as in the present day. In the English of 

 Chaucer, though it was not so to the same degree in that of 

 some of his contemporaries, these case-endings, except the a or es 

 of the genitive, are lost, the rest being represented, if at all, 

 by an e at the end of the word, which e is sometimes sounded 

 and sometimes silent. In words of French origin, also, the 

 final e is in Chaucer, as in French poetry, as often sounded 

 as mute. The presence of the final e in many words in which 

 it is no longer written, and the fact that this final e is 

 habitually sounded as an additional syllable of the word, ia the 

 one strongly marked difference between Chaucer's English and 

 our own so far as the noun is concerned. But it will be noticed 

 by every reader of Chaucer that the sounding of the final e ia 

 by no means an invariable rule ; indeed, it is probably quite 

 as often silent, especially before a vowel or the letter h, from 

 which it may be inferred that in Chaucer's day the older pro- 

 nunciation was beginning to give way to the modern. Thus 

 such words as poore (poor) and time are sometimes, as the metre 

 shows, to be read as we pronounce them now, and sometimes as 

 poore, time. In the verb, also, there are a few old forms still 

 retained in Chaucer which we have now lost. Thus the infinitive 

 of the verb, instead of being, as now, to seek, is more commonly 

 to seeken, or to seeke. The plural of the present tense, instead 

 of being we, you, or they seek, was generally u-e, you, or hi seeken , 

 the still older form ending in eth being occasionally found. 

 The imperative mood is not seek, but seeketh. In the past 

 participle Chaucer still habitually retains the old prefix t or y 

 (corresponding to the German ge, as gehabt, from haben) at the 

 beginning of the word. Thus he writes itau<jht, ipinchtd, 

 isett, when we should say taught, pinched, tet. With the exception 

 of these points, however, and some others of minor importance, 

 the chief differences between Chaucer's English and our own 

 are differences of spelling. And as the eye becomes accustomed 

 to the older spelling, and the few antique grammatical forms 

 become familiar, every student will find that he meets no greater 

 difficulty in reading Chaucer than that which arises front 

 an occasional obsolete word, for which a dictionary has to be 

 consulted. 



The versification of Chaucer has been the subject of much 

 controversy. To some his lines have seemed absolutely without 

 metre, rhythm, or order of any kind ; while others have 

 perhaps run into an opposite extreme, and represented his 

 versification to be as regular a* that of Pope or Goldsmith. 

 The truth seems to be that in general Chaucer's versification 

 is quite regular, the proper measure of syllables being found 

 in the lino and the proper number of accents. The seeming 

 irregularity arises from not attending to the pronunciation of 

 words in Chaucer's time. But, on the other hand, it is plain 

 that Chaucer did allow himself far greater licence in the 



