The Earl of Derby's Return to London in i^p^ 167 



and one daughter.^ He was tall, delicate,^ and knightly, but of 

 consuming energy.^ As his beard in later life was russet,* and 

 his mother's hair was golden,^ it is easy to infer that he was 

 of the sanguine temperament. Chaucer describes John of Gaunt 

 as having little hair upon his beard at the age of 24,*^ but we 

 may well suppose that Henry's beard, at 27, was somewhat 

 more developed.'^ His face was no doubt more or less pitted with / 

 the smallpox or some other eruption, from which he had suffered / 

 in 1387.^ Altogether, with the toning down of pock-marks to/ 

 freckles, he seems to have sat for the portrait of Emetreus in the' 

 Knight's Tale'-*: 



With Arcita, in stories as men finde, 

 The grete Emetreus, the king of Inde,^" 

 Upon a stede bay," trapped in steel, 



^Blanche (spring of 1392). For the dates, see Wylie 3. 324, 326; 

 4. 133, 167; D. A., pp. Ixxxii, 10;?, 10; cf. Ramsay, Lancaster and York 

 I. 159, and Table I. 



^ Wylie 4. 134, 152; Ramsay (Lancaster and York i, 141-2) calls hin» 

 a neat, well-built, good-looking man of middle size. 



^ Wylie 4. 146. 



* Ramsay, Lancaster and York i. 142; Wylie speaks of his thick red 

 beard (4. 125). 



'Chaucer, Bk. Duch. 858. 



^ Bk. Duch. 456; John of Gaunt was really 29 at the death of Blanche 

 in 1369, when Blanche herself was 28 (Armitage-Smith, p. 21), though 

 Froissart (Poesies, ed. Scheler, 2. 8) says she was about 22 ('environ de 

 vingt et deux ans'). 



'K. T. 1315: A 2173. • . 



« Wylie 4. 152, 158. ^^^ 



"1297-1328: A 2155-86. ^ 



^^ There ' is nothing in the Teseide to correspond with this portrait. 

 Chaucer saw a good opportunity to introduce it, and modeled it upon the 

 life, as perhaps in cases like the Wife of Bath (Coulton, p. 26, note) and /\ 

 the Host (Skeat 5. 129; Coulton, p. 149). 



" It is difficult to say whether Henry is more likely to have ridden a 

 bay or a white horse. Troilus sits on a bay steed (T. and C. 2. 624; cf. 

 I- 1073; 5. 1038), so that possibly the trait is conventional. White 

 horses were in favor with the great. Chaucer may have seen (Emerson 

 3. 322) King John of France ride through London, in May, 1357, by the 

 side of his captor, the Black Prince, mounted on a white steed (Kervyn 

 6. 18). Gower has a rout of ladies ride on fair ambling horses, white, fat, 

 and great (Cow/. Am. 4. 1306-10; cf. 1343). At the funeral of Arcite 

 (K. T. 2031 ff.': A 289Q ff.), his arms were borne upon three steeds, 

 great and white. At Griselda's home-coming, after her marriage, she 



