in his verse, was still
living, he may have met Boccaccio; at Padua, like his own clerk of
Oxenford, he possibly caught the story of Griseldis from the lips of
Petrarca.

[Sidenote: His Early Poems]

It was these visits to Italy which gave us the Chaucer whom we know. From
that hour his work stands out in vivid contrast with the poetic literature
from the heart of which it sprang. The long French romances were the
product of an age of wealth and ease, of indolent curiosity, of a fanciful
and self-indulgent sentiment. Of the great passions which gave life to the
Middle Ages, that of religious enthusiasm had degenerated into the conceits
of Mariolatry, that of war into the extravagances of Chivalry. Love indeed
remained; it was the one theme of troubadour and trouveur; but it was a
love of refinement, of romantic follies, of scholastic discussions, of
sensuous enjoyment--a plaything rather than a passion. Nature had to
reflect the pleasant indolence of man; the song of the minstrel moved
through a perpetual May-time; the grass was ever green; the music of the
lark and the nightingale rang out from field and thicket. There was a gay
avoidance of all that is serious, moral, or reflective in man's life: life
was too amusing to be serious, too piquant, too sentimental, too full of
interest and gaiety and chat. It was an age of talk: "mirth is none," says
Chaucer's host, "to ride on by the way dumb as a stone "; and the Trouveur
aimed simply at being the most agreeable talker of his day. His romances,
his rimes of Sir Tristram, his Romance of the Rose, are full of colour and
fantasy, endless in detail, but with a sort of gorgeous idleness about
their very length, the minuteness of their description of outer things, the
vagueness of their touch when it passes to the subtler inner world.

It was with this literature that Chaucer had till now been familiar, and it
was this which he followed in his earlier work. But from the time of his
visits to Milan and Genoa his sympathies drew him not to the dying verse of
France but to the new and mighty upgrowth of poetry in Italy. Dante's eagle
looks at him from the sun. "Fraunces Petrark, the laureat poete," is to him
one "whose rethorique sweete enlumyned al Itail of poetrie." The "Troilus"
which he produced about 1382 is an enlarged English version of Boccaccio's
"Filostrato"; the Knight's Tale, whose first draft is of the same period,
bears slight traces of his Teseide. It was inde