years, at the annual rent of four marks (L2, 13s. 4d.) Until the
1st of March 1400, Chaucer drew his pensions in person; then
they were received for him by another hand; and on the 25th of
October, in the same year, he died, at the age of seventy-two.
The only lights thrown by his poems on his closing days are
furnished in the little ballad called "Good Counsel of Chaucer,"
-- which, though said to have been written when "upon his
death-bed lying in his great anguish, "breathes the very spirit of
courage, resignation, and philosophic calm; and by the
"Retractation" at the end of The Canterbury Tales, which, if it
was not foisted in by monkish transcribers, may be supposed the
effect of Chaucer's regrets and self-reproaches on that solemn
review of his life-work which the close approach of death
compelled. The poet was buried in Westminster Abbey; <12>
and not many years after his death a slab was placed on a pillar
near his grave, bearing the lines, taken from an epitaph or
eulogy made by Stephanus Surigonus of Milan, at the request of
Caxton:

"Galfridus Chaucer, vates, et fama poesis
Maternae, hoc sacra sum tumulatus humo." <13>

About 1555, Mr Nicholas Brigham, a gentleman of Oxford who
greatly admired the genius of Chaucer, erected the present
tomb, as near to the spot where the poet lay, "before the chapel
of St Benet," as was then possible by reason of the "cancelli,"
<14> which the Duke of Buckingham subsequently obtained
leave to remove, that room might be made for the tomb of
Dryden. On the structure of Mr Brigham, besides a full-length
representation of Chaucer, taken from a portrait drawn by his