the bulk of his life was spent.  His family, though not noble, seems to have been of some importance, for from the opening of his career we find Chaucer in close connexion with the Court.  At sixteen he was made page to the wife of Lionel of Clarence; at nineteen he first bore arms in the campaign of 1359.  But he was luckless enough to be made prisoner; and from the time of his release after the treaty of Bretigny he took no further share in the military enterprises of his time.  He seems again to have returned to service about the Court, and it was now that his first poems made their appearance, the “Compleynte to Pity” in 1368, and in 1369 the “Death of Blanch the Duchesse,” the wife of John of Gaunt who from this time at least may be looked upon as his patron.  It may have been to John’s influence that he owed his employment in seven diplomatic missions which were probably connected with the financial straits of the Crown.  Three of these, in 1372, 1374, and 1378, carried him to Italy.  He visited Genoa and the brilliant court of the Visconti at Milan; at Florence, where the memory of Dante, the “great master” whom he commemorates so reverently in his verse, was still living, he may have met Boccaccio; at Padua, like his own clerk of Oxenford, he possibly caught the story of Griseldis from the lips of Petrarca.

[Sidenote:  His Early Poems]

It was these visits to Italy which gave us the Chaucer whom we know.  From that hour his work stands out in vivid contrast with the poetic literature from the heart of which it sprang.  The long French romances were the product of an age of wealth and ease, of indolent curiosity, of a fanciful and self-indulgent sentiment.  Of the great passions which gave life to the Middle Ages, that of religious enthusiasm had degenerated into the conceits of Mariolatry, that of war into the extravagances of Chivalry.  Love indeed remained; it was the one theme of troubadour and trouveur; but it was a love of refinement, of romantic follies, of scholastic discussions, of sensuous enjoyment—­a plaything rather than a passion.  Nature had to reflect the pleasant indolence of man; the song of the minstrel moved through a perpetual May-time; the grass was ever green; the music of the lark and the nightingale rang out from field and thicket.  There was a gay avoidance of all that is serious, moral, or reflective in man’s life:  life was too amusing to be serious, too piquant, too sentimental, too full of interest and gaiety and chat.  It was an age of talk:  “mirth is none,” says Chaucer’s host, “to ride on by the way dumb as a stone “; and the Trouveur aimed simply at being the most agreeable talker of his day.  His romances, his rimes of Sir Tristram, his Romance of the Rose, are full of colour and fantasy, endless in detail, but with a sort of gorgeous idleness about their very length, the minuteness of their description of outer things, the vagueness of their touch when it passes to the subtler inner world.