love of books he is constantly referring; indeed, this may be said to
be the only kind of egotism which he seems to take a pleasure in
indulging. At the opening of his earliest extant poem of consequence,
the "Book of the Duchess," he tells us how he preferred to drive away a
night rendered sleepless through melancholy thoughts, by means of a
book, which he thought better entertainment than a game either at chess
or at "tables." This passion lasted longer with him than the other
passion which it had helped to allay; for in the sequel to the
well-known passage in the "House of Fame," already cited, he gives us a
glimpse of himself at home, absorbed in his favourite pursuit:--

Thou go'st home to thy house anon,
And there, as dumb as any stone,
Thou sittest at another book,
Till fully dazed is thy look;
And liv'st thus as a hermit quite,
Although thy abstinence is slight.

And doubtless he counted the days lost in which he was prevented from
following the rule of life which elsewhere be sets himself, to study
and to read alway, day by day," and pressed even the nights into his
service when he was not making his head ache with writing. How eager
and, considering the times in which he lived, how diverse a reader he
was, has already been abundantly illustrated in the course of this
volume. His knowledge of Holy Writ was considerable, though it
probably for the most part came to him at second-hand. He seems to
have had some acquaintance with patristic and homiletic literature; he
produced a version of the homily on Mary Magdalene, improperly
attributed to Origen; and, as we have seen, emulated King Alfred in
translating Boethius's famous manual of moral philosophy. His Latin
learning extended over a wide range of literature, from Virgil and Ovid
down to some of the favourite Latin poets of the Middle Ages. It is to
be feared that he occasionally read Latin authors with so eager a
desire to arrive at the contents of their books that he at times
mistook their meaning--not far otherwise, slightly to vary a happy
comparison made by one of his most eminent commentators, than many
people read Chaucer's own writings now-a-days. That he possessed any
knowledge at all of Greek may be doubted, both on general grounds and
on account of a little slip or two in quotation of a kind not unusual
with those who quote what they have not previously read. His "Troilus
and Cressid" has only a very distant connexion indeed wi