company of one who, so far as we know, had never forfeited the goodwill of
any patron or the attachment of any friend. We may, too, imagine him
visited by associates who loved and honoured the poet as well as the man--
by Gower, blind or nearly so, if tradition speak the truth, and who,
having "long had sickness upon hand," seems unlike Chaucer to have been
ministered to in his old age by a housewife whom he had taken to himself
in contradiction of principles preached by both the poets; and by
"Bukton," converted, perchance, by means of Chaucer's gift to him of the
"Wife of Bath's Tale," to a resolution of perpetual bachelorhood, but
otherwise, as Mr. Carlyle would say, "dim to us." Besides these, if he
was still among the living, the philosophical Strode in his Dominican
habit, on a visit to London from one of his monasteries; or--more
probably--the youthful Lydgate, not yet a Benedictine monk, but pausing,
on his return from his travels in divers lands, to sit awhile, as it were,
at the feet of the master in whose poetic example he took pride; the
courtly Scogan; and Occleve, already learned, who was to cherish the
memory of Chaucer's outward features as well as of his fruitful
intellect:--all these may in his closing days have gathered around their
friend; and perhaps one or the other may have been present to close the
watchful eyes for ever.

But there was yet another company with which, in these last years, and
perhaps in these last days of his life, Chaucer had intercourse, of which
he can rarely have lost sight, and which even in solitude he must have had
constantly with him. This company has since been well known to
generations and centuries of Englishmen. Its members head that goodly
procession of figures which have been familiar to our fathers as livelong
friends, which are the same to us, and will be to our children after us --
the procession of the nation's favourites among the characters created by
our great dramatists and novelists, the eternal types of human nature