moment is the curtain lifted, and we behold, in the old quaint peaked
and gabled Fleet Street of that day, Chaucer thrashing a Franciscan
friar (friar's offence unknown), for which amusement he was next
morning fined two shillings. History has preserved this for us, but
has forgotten all the rest of his early life, and the chronology of all
his poems. What curious flies are sometimes found in the historic
amber! On Chaucer's own authority, we know that he served under Edward
III. in his French campaign, and that he for some time lay in a French
prison. On his return from captivity he married; he was valet in the
king's household, he was sent on an embassy to Genoa, and is supposed
to have visited Petrarch, then resident at Padua, and to have heard
from his lips the story of "Griselda,"--a tradition which one would
like to believe. He had his share of the sweets and the bitters of
life. He enjoyed offices and gifts of wine, and he felt the pangs of
poverty and the sickness of hope deferred. He was comptroller of the
customs for wools; from which post he was dismissed,--why, we know not;
although one cannot help remembering that Edward made the writing out
of the accounts in Chaucer's own hand the condition of his holding
office, and having one's surmises. Foreign countries, strange manners,
meetings with celebrated men, love of wife and children, and their
deaths, freedom and captivity, the light of a king's smile and its
withdrawal, furnished ample matter of meditation to his humane and
thoughtful spirit. In his youth he wrote allegories full of ladies and
knights dwelling in impossible forests and nursing impossible passions;
but in his declining years, when fortune had done all it could for him
and all it could against him, he discarded these dreams, and betook
himself to the actual stuff of human nature. Instead of the "Romance
of the Rose," we have the "Canterbury Tales" and the first great
English poet. One likes to fancy Chaucer in his declining days living
at Woodstock, with his books about him, and where he could watch the
daisies opening themselves at sunrise, shutting themselves at sunset,
and composing his wonderful stories, in which the fourteenth century
lives,--riding to battle in iron gear, hawking in embroidered jerkin
and waving plume, sitting in rich and solemn feast, the monarch on the
dais.

Chaucer's early poems have music and fancy, they are full of a natural
delight in sunshine and the