By this connexion Chaucer acquired the powerful support of the Lancastrian family; and during his life his fortune fluctuated with theirs. Tradition has assigned to him a lodge, near the royal abode of Woodstock, by the park gate, where it is probable that he composed some of his early works; and there are passages in these which strikingly coincide with the scenery of his supposed habitation. There is also reason to presume that he accompanied his warlike monarch to France in the year 1359; and from the record of his evidence in a military court, which has been lately discovered, we find that he gave testimony to a fact which he witnessed in that kingdom in the capacity of a soldier. But the expedition of that year, which ended in the peace of Bretigné, gave little opportunity of seeing military service; and he certainly never resumed the profession of arms.

In the year 1367 he received from Edward III. a pension of twenty marks per annum, a sum which in those times might probably be equivalent to two or three hundred pounds at the present day. In the patent for this annuity he is styled by the king

appears from other evidence, however, that Chaucer's wife's name was Philippa Pykard. Mr. Tyrwhitt explains the circumstance of the sisters having different names, by supposing that the father and his eldest daughter Catherine might bear the name of De Rouet, from some estate in their possession; while the family name Pykard was retained by the younger daughter Philippa, who was Chaucer's wife.

valettus noster. The name valettus was given to young men of the highest quality before they were knighted, though not as a badge of service. Chaucer, however, at the date of this pension, was not a young man, being then in his thirty-ninth year. He did not acquire the title of scutifer, or esquire, till five years after, when he was appointed joint envoy to Genoa with Sir James Pronan and Sir John de Mari. It has been conjectured, that after finishing the business of this mission he paid a reverential visit to Petrarch, who was that year at Padua1. The

1 Mr. Tyrwhitt is upon the whole inclined to doubt of this poetical meeting; and De Sade, who, in his Memoires pour la Vie de Petrarque, conceived he should be able to prove that it took place, did not live to fulfil his promise. The circumstance which, taken collaterally with the fact of Chaucer's appointment to go to Italy, has been considered as giving the strongest probability to the English poet's having visited Petrarch, is that Chaucer makes one of the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales declare, that he learnt his story from the worthy clerk of Padua. The story is that of Patient Grisilde; which, in fact, originally belonged to Boccaccio, and was only translated into Latin by Petrarch. It is not easy to explain, as Mr. Tyrwhitt remarks, why Chaucer should have proclaimed his obligation to Petrarch, while he really owed it to Boccaccio. According to Mr. Godwin, it was to have an occasion of boasting of his friendship with the Italian laureat. But why does he not boast of it in his own person? He makes the clerk of Oxford declare, that he had his story from the clerk of Padua, but he does not say that he had it himself from that quarter. Mr. Godwin, however, believes that he shadows forth himself under the character of the lean scholar. This is surely improbable; when the poet in another place describes himself as round

fact, however, of an interview, so pleasing to the imagination, rests upon no certain evidence; nor are there even satisfactory proofs that he ever went on his Italian embassy.

His genius and connexions seem to have kept him in prosperity during the whole of Edward III.'s reign, and during the period of John of Gaunt's influence in the succeeding one. From Edward he had a grant of a pitcher of wine a day, in 1374, and was made comptroller of the small customs of wool and of the small customs of wine in the port of London. In the next year the king granted him the wardship of Sir Simon Staplegate's heir, for which he received £104. The following year he received some forfeited wool to the value of 71 4s. 6d. sums probably equal in effective value to twenty times their modern denomination. In the last year of Edward he was appointed joint envoy to France with Sir Guichard Dangle and Sir Richard Stan, or Sturrey, to treat of a marriage between Richard Prince of Wales and the daughter of the French king. His circumstances during this middle part of his life must have been honourable and opulent; and they enabled him, as he tells us in his Testa

and jolly, while the poor Oxford scholar is lank and meager. If Chaucer really was corpulent, it was indeed giving but a shadow of himself to paint his figure as very lean: but why should he give himself a double existence, and describe both the jolly substance and the meager shadow?

ment of Love, to maintain a plentiful hospitality; but the picture of his fortunes was sadly reversed by the decline of John of Gaunt's influence at the court of Richard II. but more immediately by the poet's connexion with an obnoxious political party in the city. This faction, whose resistance to an arbitrary court was dignified with the name of a rebellion, was headed by John of Northampton, or Comberton, who in religious tenets was connected with the followers of Wickliffe, and in political interests with the Duke of Lancaster; a connexion which accounts for Chaucer having been implicated in the business. His pension, it is true, was renewed under Richard; and an additional allowance of twenty marks per annum was made to him, in lieu of his daily pitcher of wine. He was also continued in his office of comptroller, and allowed to execute it by deputy, at a time when there is every reason to believe that he must have been in exile. It is certain, however, that he was compelled to fly from the kingdom on account of his political connexions; and retired first to Hainault, then to France, and finally to Zealand. He returned to England, but was arrested and committed to prison. The coincidence of the time of his severest usage with that of the Duke of Gloucester's power, has led to a fair supposition that that usurper was personally a greater enemy to the poet than King Richard himself, whose disposition towards him

might have been softened by the good offices of Anne of Bohemia, a princess never mentioned by Chaucer but in terms of the warmest panegyric.

While he was abroad, his circumstances had been impoverished by his liberality to some of his fellow fugitives; and his effects at home had been cruelly embezzled by those entrusted with their management, who endeavoured, as he tells us, to make him perish for absolute want.

In 1388, while yet a prisoner, he was obliged to dispose of his two pensions, which were all the resources now left to him by his persecutors. As the price of his release from imprisonment, he was obliged to make a confession respecting the late conspiracy. It is not known what he revealed; certainly nothing to the prejudice of John of Gaunt, since that prince continued to be his friend.

To his acknowledged partizans, who had betrayed and tried to starve him during his banishment, he owed no fidelity. It is true, that extorted evidence is one of the last ransoms which a noble mind would wish to pay for liberty; but before we blame Chaucer for making any confession, we should consider how fair and easy the lessons of uncapitulating fortitude may appear on the outside of a prison, and yet how hard it may be to read them by the light of a dungeon. As far as dates can be guessed at in so obscure a transaction, his liberation took place after Richard had shaken off the domineering party of Gloucester, and had begun to act for himself.