ho that is most virtuous alway
Privy and open, and most intendeth aye
To do the gentle deedes that he can,
Take him for the greatest gentleman.
Christ wills we claim of Him our gentleness,
Not of our elders for their old riches.
For though they give us all their heritage
Through which we claim to be of high parage,
Yet may they not bequeathe for no thing--
To none of us--their virtuous living,
That made them gentlemen y-called be,
And bade us follow them in such degree.
Well can the wise poet of Florence,
That Dante highte, speak of this sentence;
Lo, in such manner of rhyme is Dante's tale:
"Seldom upriseth by its branches small
Prowess of man; for God of His prowess
Wills that we claim of Him our gentleness;
For of our ancestors we no thing claim
But temporal thing, that men may hurt and maim."
(The passage in Canto 8 of the "Purgatorio" is thus translated by
Longfellow:

"Not oftentimes upriseth through the branches
The probity of man; and this He wills
Who gives it, so that we may ask of Him."

Its intention is only to show that the son is not necessarily what the
father is before him; thus, Edward I of England is a mightier man than
was his father Henry III. Chaucer has ingeniously, though not
altogether legitimately, pressed the passage into his service.)

By the still ignobler greed of money for its own sake there is no
reason whatever to suppose Chaucer to have been at any time actuated;
although, under the pressure of immediate want, he devoted a
"Complaint" to his empty purse, and made known, in the proper quarters,
his desire to see it refilled. Finally, as to what is commonly called
pleasure, he may have shared the fashions and even the vices of his
age; but we know hardly anything on the subject, except that excess in
wine, which is often held a pardonable peccadillo in a poet, receives
his emphatic condemnation. It would be hazardous to assert of him, as
Herrick asserted of himself that though his "Muse was jocund, life was
chaste;" inasmuch as his name occurs in one unfortunate connexion full
of suspiciousness. But we may at least believe him to have spoken his
own sentiments in the Doctor of Physic's manly declaration that

--of all treason sovereign pestilence
Is when a man betrayeth innocence.

His true pleasures lay far away from those of vanity and dissipation.
In the first place, he seems to have been a passionate reader. To his