[Footnote 7:  Pigs.] [Footnote 8:  Will.] [Footnote 9:  Dream.]

Although the writings thus far mentioned are of very high interest to the student of the English language and the historian of English manners and culture, they cannot be said to have much importance as mere literature.  But in Geoffrey Chaucer (died 1400) we meet with a poet of the first rank, whose works are increasingly read and will always continue to be a source of delight and refreshment to the general reader as well as a “well of English undefiled” to the professional man of letters.  With the exception of Dante, Chaucer was the greatest of the poets of mediaeval Europe, and he remains one of the greatest of English poets, and certainly the foremost of English story tellers in verse.  He was the son of a London vintner, and was 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.]