Of his life we do not know much.  In his youth he studied law and disliked it,—­a circumstance common enough in the lives of men of letters, from his time to that of Shirley Brooks.  How he lived, what he did when he was a student, we are unable to discover.  Only for a moment is the curtain lifted, and we behold, in the old quaint peaked and gabled Fleet Street of that day, Chaucer thrashing a Franciscan friar (friar’s offence unknown), for which amusement he was next morning fined two shillings.  History has preserved this for us, but has forgotten all the rest of his early life, and the chronology of all his poems.  What curious flies are sometimes found in the historic amber!  On Chaucer’s own authority, we know that he served under Edward III. in his French campaign, and that he for some time lay in a French prison.  On his return from captivity he married; he was valet in the king’s household, he was sent on an embassy to Genoa, and is supposed to have visited Petrarch, then resident at Padua, and to have heard from his lips the story of “Griselda,”—­a tradition which one would like to believe.  He had his share of the sweets and the bitters of life.  He enjoyed offices and gifts of wine, and he felt the pangs of poverty and the sickness of hope deferred.  He was comptroller of the customs for wools; from which post he was dismissed,—­why, we know not; although one cannot help remembering that Edward made the writing out of the accounts in Chaucer’s own hand the condition of his holding office, and having one’s surmises.  Foreign countries, strange manners, meetings with celebrated men, love of wife and children, and their deaths, freedom and captivity, the light of a king’s smile and its withdrawal, furnished ample matter of meditation to his humane and thoughtful spirit.  In his youth he wrote allegories full of ladies and knights dwelling in impossible forests and nursing impossible passions; but in his declining years, when fortune had done all it could for him and all it could against him, he discarded these dreams, and betook himself to the actual stuff of human nature.  Instead of the “Romance of the Rose,” we have the “Canterbury Tales” and the first great English poet.  One likes to fancy Chaucer in his declining days living at Woodstock, with his books about him, and where he could watch the daisies opening themselves at sunrise, shutting themselves at sunset, and composing his wonderful stories, in which the fourteenth century lives,—­riding to battle in iron gear, hawking in embroidered jerkin and waving plume, sitting in rich and solemn feast, the monarch on the dais.