on the subject? In the first place, nothing could be clearer than that
Chaucer was a very free-spoken critic of the life of the clergy--more
especially of the Regular clergy,--of his times. In this character he
comes before us from his translation of the "Roman de la Rose" to the
"Parson's Tale" itself, where he inveighs with significant earnestness
against self indulgence on the part of those who are Religious, or have
"entered into Orders, as sub-deacon, or deacon, or priest, or
hospitallers." In the "Canterbury Tales," above all, his attacks upon the
Friars run nearly the whole gamut of satire, stopping short perhaps before
the note of high moral indignation. Moreover, as has been seen, his long
connexion with John of Gaunt is a well-established fact; and it has thence
been concluded that Chaucer fully shared the opinions and tendencies
represented by his patron. In the supposition that Chaucer approved of
the countenance for a long time shown by John of Gaunt to Wyclif there is
nothing improbable; neither, however, is there anything improbable in this
other supposition, that, when the Duke of Lancaster openly washed his
hands of the heretical tenets to the utterance of which Wyclif had
advanced, Chaucer, together with the large majority of Englishmen, held
with the politic duke rather than with the still unflinching Reformer. So
long as Wyclif's movement consisted only of an opposition to
ecclesiastical pretensions on the one hand, and of an attempt to revive
religious sentiment on the other, half the country or more was Wycliffite,
and Chaucer no doubt with the rest. But it would require positive
evidence to justify the belief that from this feeling Chaucer ever passed
to sympathy with LOLLARDRY, in the vague but sufficiently intelligible
sense attaching to that term in the latter part of Richard the Second's
reign. Richard II himself, whose patronage of Chaucer is certain, in the
end attempted rigorously to suppress Lollardry; and Henry IV, the politic
John of Gaunt's yet more politic son, to whom Chaucer owed the prosperity
enjoyed by him in the last year of his life, became a persecutor almost as