ehand. Even in this "Complaint" (the term was a
technical one for an elegiac piece, and was so used by Spenser) there
is a certain frank geniality of tone, the natural accompaniment of an
easy conscience, which goes some way to redeem the nature of the
subject. Still, the theme remains one which only an exceptionally
skilful treatment can make sufficiently pathetic or perfectly comic.
The lines had the desired effect; for within four days after his
accession--i.e. on October 3rd, 1399--the "conqueror of Brut's Albion,"
otherwise King Henry IV, doubled Chaucer's pension of twenty marks, so
that, continuing as he did to enjoy the annuity of twenty pounds
granted him by King Richard, he was now once more in comfortable
circumstances. The best proof of these lies in the fact that very
speedily--on Christmas Eve, 1399--Chaucer, probably in a rather
sanguine mood, covenanted for the lease for fifty-three years of a
house in the garden of the chapel of St. Mary at Westminster. And
here, in comfort and in peace, as there seems every reason to believe,
he died before another year, and with it the century, had quite run
out--on October 25th, 1400.

Our fancy may readily picture to itself the last days of Geoffrey
Chaucer, and the ray of autumn sunshine which gilded his reverend head
before it was bowed in death. His old patron's more fortunate son,
whose earlier chivalrous days we are apt to overlook in thinking of him
as a politic king and the sagacious founder of a dynasty, cannot have
been indifferent to the welfare of a subject for whose needs he had
provided with so prompt a liberality. In the vicinity of a throne the
smiles of royalty are wont to be contagious--and probably many a
courtier thought well to seek the company of one who, so far as we
know, had never forfeited the goodwill of any patron or the attachment
of any friend. We may, too, imagine him visited by associates who
loved and honoured the poet as well as the man--by Gower, blind or
nearly so, if tradition speak the truth, and who, having "long had
sickness upon hand," seems unlike Chaucer to have been ministered to in
his old age by a housewife whom he had taken to himself in
contradiction of principles preached by both the poets; and by
"Bukton," converted, perchance, by means of Chaucer's gift to him of
the "Wife of Bath's Tale," to a resolution of perpetual bachelorhood,
but otherwise, as Mr. Carlyle would say, "dim to us." Besides these,
if he wa