in his youth in the service of
Lionel, Duke of Clarence, one of the sons of Edward III. He made a
campaign in France in 1359-60, when he was taken prisoner. Afterward he
was attached to the court and received numerous favors and appointments.
He was sent on several diplomatic missions by the king, three of them to
Italy, where, in all probability, he made the acquaintance of the new
Italian literature, the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. He
was appointed at different times comptroller of the wool customs,
comptroller of petty customs, and clerk of the works. He sat for Kent in
Parliament, and he received pensions from three successive kings. He was
a man of business as well as books, and he loved men and nature no less
than study. He knew his world; he "saw life steadily and saw it whole."
Living at the center of English social and political life, and
resorting to the court of Edward III., then the most brilliant in
Europe, Chaucer was an eye-witness of those feudal pomps which fill the
high-colored pages of his contemporary, the French chronicler,
Froissart. His description of a tournament in the _Knight's Tale_ is
unexcelled for spirit and detail. He was familiar with dances, feasts,
state ceremonies, and all the life of the baronial castle, in bower and
hall: the "trompes with the loude minstralcie," the heralds, the ladies,
and the squires. He knew--

What hawkes sitten on the perch above,
What houndes liggen[10] on the floor adown.

But his sympathy reached no less the life of the lowly; the poor widow
in her narrow cottage, and that "trewe swynkere[11] and a good," the
plowman whom Langland had made the hero of his vision. He is, more than
all English poets, the poet of the lusty spring, of "Aprille with her
showres sweet" and the "foules song;" of "May with all her floures and
her green;" of the new leaves in the wood, and the meadows new powdered
with the daisy, the mystic Marguerite of his _Legend of Good Women_. A
fresh vernal air blows through all his pages.

[Footnote 10: Lie.]
[Footnote 11: Laborer.]

In Chaucer's earlier works, such as the translation of the _Romaunt of
the Rose_ (if that be his), the _Boke of the Duchesse_, the _Parlament
of Foules_, the _Hous of Fame_, as well as in the _Legend of Good
Women_, which was later, the inspiration of the French court poetry of
the 13th and 14th centuries is manifest. He retains in them the mediaeval
machinery of allegories and dreams, th