The poet led a busy life.  He was a good business man, and soon we find him in the civil service, as we would call it now.  He was made Comptroller of Customs, and in this post he had to work hard, for one of the conditions was that he must write out the accounts with his own hand, and always be in the office himself.  If we may take some lines he wrote to be about himself, he was so busy all day long that he had not time to hear what was happening abroad, or even what was happening among his friends and neighbors.

    “Not only from far countree,
    That there no tidings cometh to thee;
    Not of thy very neighbours,
    That dwellen almost at thy doors,
    Thou hearest neither that nor this.”

Yet after his hard office work was done he loved nothing better than to go back to his books, for he goes on to say: 

    “For when thy labour done all is
    And hast y-made thy reckonings,
    Instead of rest and newe things
    Thou goest home to thy house anon,
    And all so dumb as any stone,
    Thou sittest at another book,
    Till fully dazed is thy look,
    And livest thus as a hermite
    Although thine abstinence is light.”

But if Chaucer loved books he loved people too, and we may believe that he readily made friends, for there was a kingly humor about him that must have drawn people to him.  And that he knew men and their ways we learn from his poetry, for it is full of knowledge of men and women.

For many years Chaucer was well off and comfortable.  But he did not always remain so.  There came a time when his friend and patron, John of Gaunt, fell from power, and Chaucer lost his appointments.  Soon after that his wife died, and with her life her pension ceased.  So for a year or two the poet knew something of poverty—­poverty at least compared to what he had been used to.  But if he lost his money he did not lose his sunny temper, and in all his writings we find little that is bitter.

After a time John of Gaunt returned to power, and again Chaucer had a post given to him, and so until he died he suffered ups and downs.  Born when Edward III was in his highest glory, Chaucer lived to see him hated by his people.  He lived through the reign of Edward’s grandson, Richard II, and knew him from the time when as a gallant yellow-haired boy he had faced Wat Tyler and his rioters, till as a worn and broken prisoner he yielded the crown to Henry of Lancaster, the son of John of Gaunt.  But before the broken King died in his darksome prison Chaucer lay taking his last rest in St. Benet’s Chapel in Westminster.  He was the first great poet to be laid there, but since then there have gathered round him so many bearing the greatest names in English literature that we call it now the “Poet’s Corner.”