usses), and accordingly belonged to a
gentle craft otherwise not unassociated with the history of poetry,
Richard was a citizen of London, and vintner, like his son John after
him. John Chaucer, whose wife's Christian name may be with tolerable
safety set down as Agnes, owned a house in Thames Street, London, not
far from the arch on which modern pilgrims pass by rail to Canterbury
or beyond, and in the neighbourhood of the great bridge, which in
Chaucer's own day, emptied its travellers on their errands, sacred or
profane, into the great Southern road, the Via Appia of England. The
house afterwards descended to John's son, Geoffrey, who released his
right to it by deed in the year 1380. Chaucer's father was probably a
man of some substance, the most usual personal recommendation to great
people in one of his class. For he was at least temporarily connected
with the Court, inasmuch as he attended King Edward III and Queen
Philippa on the memorable journey to Flanders and Germany, in the
course of which the English monarch was proclaimed Vicar of the Holy
Roman Empire on the left bank of the Rhine. John Chaucer died in 1366,
and in course of time his widow married another citizen and vintner.
Thomas Heyroun, John Chaucer's brother of the half-blood, was likewise
a member of the same trade; so that the young Geoffrey was certainly
not brought up in an atmosphere of abstinence. The "Host" of the
"Canterbury Tales," though he takes his name from an actual personage,
may therefore have in him touches of a family portrait; but Chaucer
himself nowhere displays any traces of a hereditary devotion to
Bacchus, and makes so experienced a practitioner as the "Pardoner" the
mouthpiece of as witty an invective against drunkenness as has been
uttered by any assailant of our existing licensing laws. Chaucer's own
practice as well as his opinion on this head is sufficiently expressed
in the characteristic words he puts into the mouth of Cressid:--

In every thing, I wot, there lies measure:
For though a man forbid all drunkenness,
He biddeth not that every creature
Be drinkless altogether, as I guess.

Of Geoffrey Chaucer we know nothing whatever from the day of his birth
(whenever it befell) to the year 1357. His earlier biographers, who
supposed him to have been born in 1328, had accordingly a fair field
open for conjecture and speculation. Here it must suffice to risk the
asseveration, that he cannot have accompanie