In the
absence of the old peer, young Hopeful spends his time as befits his
rank and expectations. He grooms his steed, plays with his hawks,
feeds his hounds, and labours diligently to acquire grace and dexterity
in the use of arms. At noon the portcullis is lowered, and out shoots
a brilliant array of ladies and gentlemen, and falconers with hawks.
They bend their course to the river, over which a rainbow is rising
from a shower. Yonder young lady is laughing at our stripling squire,
who seems half angry, half pleased: they are lovers, depend upon it. A
few years, and the merry beauty will have become a noble, gracious
woman, and the young fellow, sitting by a watch-fire on the eve of
Cressy, will wonder if she is thinking of him. But the river is
already reached. Up flies the alarmed heron, his long blue legs
trailing behind him; a hawk is let loose; the young lady's laugh has
ceased as, with gloved hand shading fair forehead and sweet gray eye,
she watches hawk and heron lessening in heaven. The Crusades are now
over, but the religious fervour which inspired them lingered behind; so
that, even in Chaucer's day, Christian kings, when their consciences
were oppressed by a crime more than usually weighty, talked of making
an effort before they died to wrest Jerusalem and the sepulchre of
Christ from the grasp of the infidel. England had at this time several
holy shrines, the most famous being that of Thomas a Becket at
Canterbury, which attracted crowds of pilgrims. The devout travelled
in large companies: and, in the May mornings, a merry sight it was as,
with infinite clatter and merriment, with bells, minstrels, and
buffoons, they passed through thorp and village, bound for the tomb of
St. Thomas. The pageant of events, which seems enchantment when
chronicled by Froissart's splendid pen, was to Chaucer contemporaneous
incident; the chivalric richness was the familiar and every-day dress
of his time. Into this princely element he was endued, and he saw
every side of it,--the frieze as well as the cloth of gold. In the
"Canterbury Tales" the fourteenth century murmurs, as the sea murmurs
in the pink-mouthed shells upon our mantelpieces.

Of his life we do not know much. In his youth he studied law and
disliked it,--a circumstance common enough in the lives of men of
letters, from his time to that of Shirley Brooks. How he lived, what
he did when he was a student, we are unable to discover. Only for a