Whether he shared Wiclif’s opinions is unknown, but John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV., who was Chaucer’s life-long patron, was likewise Wiclif’s great upholder against the persecution of the bishops.  It is, perhaps, not without significance that the poor parson in the Canterbury Tales, the only one of his ecclesiastical pilgrims whom Chaucer treats with respect, is suspected by the host of the Tabard to be a “loller,” that is, a Lollard, or disciple of Wiclif, and that, because he objects to the jovial innkeeper’s swearing “by Goddes bones.”

Chaucer’s English is nearly as easy for a modern reader as Shakspere’s, and few of his words have become obsolete.  His verse, when rightly read, is correct and melodious.  The early English was, in some respects, “more sweet upon the tongue” than the modern language.  The vowels had their broad Italian sounds, and the speech was full of soft gutterals and vocalic syllables, like the endings en, es, e, which made feminine rhymes and kept the consonants from coming harshly together.

Great poet as Chaucer was, he was not quite free from the literary weakness of his time.  He relapses sometimes into the babbling style of the old chroniclers and legend writers; cites “auctours” and gives long catalogues of names and objects with a naive display of learning; and introduces vulgar details in his most exquisite passages.  There is something childish about almost all the thought and art of the Middle Ages—­at least outside of Italy, where classical models and traditions never quite lost their hold.  But Chaucer’s artlessness is half the secret of his wonderful ease in story-telling, and is so engaging that, like a child’s sweet unconsciousness, one would not wish it otherwise.

The Canterbury Tales had shown of what high uses the English language was capable, but the curiously trilingual condition of literature still continued.  French was spoken in the proceedings of Parliament as late as the reign of Henry VI. (1422-1471).  Chaucer’s contemporary, John Gower, wrote his Vox Clamantis in Latin, his Speculum Meditantis (a lost poem), and a number of ballades in Parisian French, and his Confessio Amantis (1393) in English.  The last named is a dreary, pedantic work, in some fifteen thousand smooth, monotonous, eight-syllabled couplets, in which Grande Amour instructs the lover how to get the love of Bel Pucel.

* * * * *

1.  Early English Literature.  Bernhard ten Brink.  Translated from the German by H.M.  Kennedy.  New York:  Henry Holt & Co., 1883.

2.  Morris and Skeat’s Specimens of Early English. (Clarendon Press Series.) Oxford.

3.  The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman.  Edited by W.W.  Skeat.  Oxford, 1886.

4.  Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  Tyrwhitt’s Edition.  New York:  D. Appleton & Co., 1883.