ancient poems under the name of Thomas Rowley, whom he feigned to be a monk of the 15th century.  Hearing of H. Walpole’s collections for his Anecdotes of Painting in England, he sent him an “ancient manuscript” containing biographies of certain painters, not hitherto known, who had flourished in England centuries before.  W. fell into the trap, and wrote asking for all the MS. he could furnish, and C. in response forwarded accounts of more painters, adding some particulars as to himself on which W., becoming suspicious, submitted the whole to T. Gray and Mason (q.v.), who pronounced the MS. to be forgeries.  Some correspondence, angry on C.’s part, ensued, and the whole budget of papers was returned.  C. thereafter, having been dismissed by Lambert, went to London, and for a short time his prospects seemed to be bright.  He worked with feverish energy, threw off poems, satires, and political papers, and meditated a history of England; but funds and spirits failed, he was starving, and the failure to obtain an appointment as ship’s surgeon, for which he had applied, drove him to desperation, and on the morning of August 25, 1770, he was found dead from a dose of arsenic, surrounded by his writings torn into small pieces.  From childhood C. had shown a morbid familiarity with the idea of suicide, and had written a last will and testament, “executed in the presence of Omniscience,” and full of wild and profane wit.  The magnitude of his tragedy is only realised when it is considered not only that the poetry he left was of a high order of originality and imaginative power, but that it was produced at an age at which our greatest poets, had they died, would have remained unknown.  Precocious not only in genius but in dissipation, proud and morose as he was, an unsympathetic age confined itself mainly to awarding blame to his literary and moral delinquencies.  Posterity has weighed him in a juster balance, and laments the early quenching of so brilliant a light.  His coll. works appeared in 1803, and another ed. by Prof.  Street in 1875.  Among these are Elinoure and Juga, Balade of Charitie, Bristowe Tragedie, AElla, and Tragedy of Godwin.

The best account of his life is the Essay by Prof.  Masson.

CHAUCER, GEOFFREY (1340?-1400).—­Poet, was b. in London, the s. of John C., a vintner of Thames Street, who had also a small estate at Ipswich, and was occasionally employed on service for the King (Edward III.), which doubtless was the means of his son’s introduction to the Court.  The acquaintance which C. displays with all branches of the learning of his time shows that he must have received an ample education; but there is no evidence that he was at either of the Univ.  In 1357 he appears as a page to the Lady Elizabeth, wife of Lionel Duke of Clarence, and in 1359 he first saw military service in France, when he was made a prisoner.  He was, however, ransomed in 1360.  About 1366 he was married to