what was more, to make the poet
desperately in love with herself.

There being no impediment in the way, and the king and queen
forwarding the matter, Chaucer and his Philippa were soon made man and
wife. Not long after their marriage they had the misfortune to lose
their generous mistress, the queen. Edward the Third, however, still
treated Chaucer with favor. He made him one of the valets of his
bed-chamber, and also gave him a high office in the customs. The two
halves of his life must now have been strangely different. One was
spent among velvet doublets, and waving plumes, and gilded armor, and
all the many splendid vanities of a court; the other among heavy
ledgers, and hard-handed sea captains, and casks of coarse spirit, and
the most vulgar realities of a commonplace life. No wonder that a man
whose time was passed among such contrasts should write by turns of a
noble knight and a miller.

Several times King Edward sent Chaucer abroad on political missions.
This is a great proof of the high esteem in which his master held him.
In one of these journeys he went into Italy and saw the Mediterranean
wash the marble quays of Genoa, and the stately towers of fair
Florence raise themselves toward the blue sky. On this occasion, some
of his biographers think, he visited Petrarch. This notion is,
however, only founded on a passage in the "Canterbury Tales;" it is
therefore our opinion that Chaucer, anxious as he must have been to
despatch quickly the king's business, would hardly have spared time to
go to Arqua, where Petrarch then lived, and that those who draw from
the passage in question the inference that the two great poets must
have met, are, as blundering critics often do, confounding the author
with his characters. One of Chaucer's personages says that he heard a
story he is about to tell from Petrarch; but that is no reason for
concluding that Chaucer so heard it himself.

Rich must have been the dramatic anecdote and lively description which
Chaucer brought home from these journeys. In those days of little
travelling, an account of foreign countries must have had freshness
and interest, even when it came from a commonplace man. What, then,
must it have been on the lips of Chaucer?

[Illustration: Chaucer and the Canterbury Pilgrims.]

In one of his absences, Chaucer's brother-poet, Gower, filled for him
his post at Court. This is a delightful proof of the friendship which
must have existed between the tw