already appears that sound and kindly judgment with which the poet will
view the things of life in his "Canterbury Tales." Evil does not prevent
his seeing good; the sadness he has known does not make him rebel
against fate; he has suffered and forgiven; joys dwell in his memory
rather than sorrows; despite his moments of melancholy, his turn of mind
makes him an optimist at heart, an optimist like La Fontaine and
Addison, whose names often recur to the memory in reading Chaucer. His
philosophy resembles the "bon-homme" La Fontaine's; and several passages
in the "Hous of Fame" are like some of Addison's essays.[501]

He is modern, too, in the part he allots to his own self, a self which,
far from being odious ("le moi est haissable," Pascal said), is, on the
contrary, charming; he relates the long vigils in his tower, where he
spends his nights in writing, or at other times seated before a book,
which he reads until his eyes are dim in his "hermyte's" solitude.

The eagle, come from heaven to be his guide, bears him off where his
fancy had already flown, above the clouds, beyond the spheres, to the
temple of Fame, built upon an ice mountain. Illustrious names graven in
the sparkling rock melt in the sun, and are already almost illegible.
The temple itself is built in the Gothic style of the period, all
bristling with "niches, pinnacles, and statues," and

... ful eek of windowes
As flakes falle in grete snowes.[502]

There are those rustling crowds in which Chaucer loved to mix at times,
whose murmurs soothed his thoughts, musicians, harpists, jugglers,
minstrels, tellers of tales full "of weping and of game," magicians,
sorcerers and prophets, curious specimens of humanity. Within the
temple, the statues of his literary gods, who sang of the Trojan war:
Homer, Dares, and also the Englishman Geoffrey of Monmouth, "English
Gaufride," and with them, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Claudian, and Statius. At
the command of Fame, the names of the heroes are borne by the wind to
the four corners of the world; a burst of music celebrates the deeds of
the warriors:

For in fight and blood-shedinge
Is used gladly clarioninge.[503]

Various companies flock to obtain glory; the poet does not forget the
group, already formed in his day, of the braggarts who boast of their
vices:

We ben shrewes, every wight,
And han delyt in wikkednes,
As gode folk han in goodnes;
And joye to be knowen shrewes ...