missions; but the
tone in which he speaks of them now has changed; to-day it is a tone of
veneration; one should kiss their "steppes." He expresses himself about
them as Petrarch did; it seems, so great is the resemblance, as if we
found in his verses an echo of the conversations they very likely had
together by Padua in 1373.[480]

In the intervals between his missions Chaucer would return to London,
where administrative functions had been entrusted to him. For twelve
years, dating from 1374, he was comptroller of the customs, and during
the ten first years he was obliged, according to his oath, to write the
accounts and to draw up the rolls of the receipts with his own hand: "Ye
shall swere that ... ye shall write the rolles by your owne hande
demesned."[481] To have an idea of the work this implies, one should
see, at the Record Office, the immense sheets of parchment fastened
together, one after the other, which constitute these rolls.[482] After
having himself been present at the weighing and verifying of the
merchandise, Chaucer entered the name of the owner, the quality and
quantity of the produce taxed, and the amount to be collected: endless
"rekeninges!" Defrauders were fined; one, John Kent, of London, having
tried to smuggle some wools to Dordrecht, the poet, poet though he was,
discovered the offence; the wools were confiscated and sold, and Chaucer
received seventy-one pounds four shillings and sixpence on the amount of
the fine John Kent had to pay.

Chaucer lived now in one of the towers under which opened the gates of
London. The municipality had granted him lodgings in the Aldgate
tower[483]; his friend the philosopher and logician, Ralph Strode, lived
in the same way in rooms above "Aldrichgate"[484]; both were to quit the
place at any moment if the defence of the town rendered it necessary.
Chaucer lived there twelve years, from 1374 to 1386. There, his labour
ended, he would come home and begin his _other life_, his poet's life,
reading, thinking, remembering. Then all he had known in Italy would
return to his memory, campaniles, azure frescoes, olive groves, sonnets
of Petrarch, poems of Dante, tales of Boccaccio; he had brought back
wherewithal to move and to enliven "merry England" herself. Once more in
his tower, whither he returned without speaking to any one, "domb," he
says, "as any stoon," the everyday world was done with; his neighbours
were to him as though they had lived at the ends of e