What Dante had done, not without murmuring, Chaucer did more cheerfully in England.  Claimed by both universities as a collegian, perhaps without truth, he certainly was an educated man, and must have been sorely tempted by Latin hexameters; but he knew his mission, and felt his power.  With a master hand he moulded the language.  He is reproached for having introduced “a wagon-load of foreign words,” i.e.  Norman words, which, although frowned upon by some critics, were greatly needed, were eagerly adopted, and constituted him the “well of English undefiled,” as he was called by Spenser.  It is no part of our plan to consider Chaucer’s language or diction, a special study which the reader can pursue for himself.  Occleve, in his work “De Regimine Principium" calls him “the honour of English tonge,” “floure of eloquence,” and “universal fadir in science,” and, above all, “the firste findere of our faire language.”  To Lydgate he was the “Floure of Poetes throughout all Bretaine.”  Measured by our standard, he is not always musical, “and,” in the language of Dryden, “many of his verses are lame for want of half a foot, and sometimes a whole one;” but he must be measured by the standards of his age, by the judgment of his contemporaries, and by a thorough intelligence of the language as he found it and as he left it.  Edward III., a practical reformer in many things, gave additional importance to English, by restoring it in the courts of law, and administering justice to the people in their own tongue.  When we read of the English kings of this early period, it is curious to reflect that these monarchs, up to the time of Edward I., spoke French as their vernacular tongue, while English had only been the mixed, corrupted language of the lower classes, which was now brought thus by king and poet into honorable consideration.

HIS DEATH.—­Chaucer died on the 25th of October, 1400, in his little tenement in the garden of St. Mary’s Chapel, Westminster, and left his works and his fame to an evil and unappreciative age.  His monument was not erected until one hundred and fifty-six years afterward, by Nicholas Brigham.  It stands in the “poets’ corner” of Westminster Abbey, and has been the nucleus of that gathering-place of the sacred dust which once enclosed the great minds of England.  The inscription, which justly styles him “Anglorum vates ter maximus,” is not to be entirely depended upon as to the “annus Domini,” or “tempora vitae,” because of the turbulent and destructive reigns that had intervened—­evil times for literary effort, and yet making material for literature and history, and producing that wonderful magician, the printing-press, and paper, by means of which the former things might be disseminated, and Chaucer brought nearer to us than to them.