y not devoid of the art of
telling stories. The mind of this author was thoroughly didactic in
its bent; for the beauty of nature he has no real feeling, and though
his poem, like so many of Chaucer's, begins in the month of May, he is
(unnecessarily) careful to tell us that his object in going forth was
not to "sing with the birds." He could not, like Chaucer, transfuse
old things into new, but there is enough in his character as a poet to
explain the friendship between the pair, of which we hear at the very
time when Gower was probably preparing his "Confessio Amantis" for
publication.

They are said afterwards to have become enemies; but in the absence of
any real evidence to that effect we cannot believe Chaucer to have been
likely to quarrel with one whom he had certainly both trusted and
admired. Nor had literary life in England already advanced to a stage
of development of which, as in the Elizabethan and Augustan ages,
literary jealousy was an indispensable accompaniment. Chaucer is
supposed to have attacked Gower in a passage of the "Canterbury Tales,"
where he incidentally declares his dislike (in itself extremely
commendable) of a particular kind of sensational stories, instancing
the subject of one of the numerous tales in the "Confessio Amantis."
There is, however, no reason whatever for supposing Chaucer to have
here intended a reflection on his brother poet, more especially as the
"Man of Law," after uttering the censure, relates, though probably not
from Gower, a story on a subject of a different kind likewise treated
by him. It is scarcely more suspicious that when Gower, in a second
edition of his chief work, dedicated in 1393 to Henry, Earl of Derby
(afterwards Henry IV), judiciously omitted the exordium and altered the
close of the first edition, both of which were complimentary to Richard
II, he left out, together with its surrounding context, a passage
conveying a friendly challenge to Chaucer as a "disciple and poet of
the God of Love."

In any case there could have been no political difference between them,
for Chaucer was at all times in favour with the House of Lancaster,
towards whose future head Gower so early contrived to assume a correct
attitude. To him--a man of substance, with landed property in three
counties--the rays of immediate court-favour were probably of less
importance than to Chaucer; but it is not necessity only which makes
courtiers of so many of us: some are born to