sort of testimony, more especially as it
is by mere conjecture that the year of Gower's own birth is placed as
far back as 1320. Still less weight can be attached to the
circumstance that another poet, Occleve, who clearly regarded himself
as the disciple of one by many years his senior, in accordance with the
common phraseology of his (and, indeed, of other) times, spoke of the
older writer as his "father" and "father reverent." In a coloured
portrait carefully painted from memory by Occleve on the margin of a
manuscript, Chaucer is represented with grey hair and beard; but this
could not of itself be taken to contradict the supposition that he died
about the age of sixty. And Leland's assertion that Chaucer attained
to old age self-evidently rests on tradition only; for Leland was born
more than a century after Chaucer died. Nothing occurring in any of
Chaucer's own works of undisputed genuineness throws any real light on
the subject. His poem, the "House of Fame," has been variously dated;
but at any period of his manhood he might have said, as he says there,
that he was "too old" to learn astronomy, and preferred to take his
science on faith. In the curious lines called "L'Envoy de Chaucer a
Scogan," the poet, while blaming his friend for his want of
perseverance in a love-suit, classes himself among "them that be hoar
and round of shape," and speaks of himself and his Muse as out of date
and rusty. But there seems no sufficient reason for removing the date
of the composition of these lines to an earlier year than 1393; and
poets as well as other men since Chaucer have spoken of themselves as
old and obsolete at fifty. A similar remark might be made concerning
the reference to the poet's old age "which dulleth him in his spirit,"
in the "Complaint of Venus," generally ascribed to the last decennium
of Chaucer's life. If we reject the evidence of a further passage, in
the "Cuckoo and the Nightingale," a poem of disputed genuineness, we
accordingly arrive at the conclusion that there is no reason for
demurring to the only direct external evidence in existence as to the
date of Chaucer's birth. At a famous trial of a cause of chivalry held
at Westminster in 1386, Chaucer, who had gone through part of a
campaign with one of the litigants, appeared as a witness; and on this
occasion his age was, doubtless on his own deposition, recorded as that
of a man "of forty years and upwards," who had borne arms for
twenty-