voucher; but the slab placed on a pillar near his grave (it is said at the
desire of Caxton), appears to have merely borne a Latin inscription
without any dates; and the marble monument erected in its stead "in the
name of the Muses" by Nicolas Brigham in 1556, while giving October 25th,
1400, as the day of Chaucer's death, makes no mention either of the date
of his birth or of the number of years to which he attained, and, indeed,
promises no more information than it gives. That Chaucer's contemporary,
the poet Gower, should have referred to him in the year 1392 as "now in
his days old," is at best a very vague sort of testimony, more especially
as it is by mere conjecture that the year of Gower's own birth is placed
as far back as 1320. Still less weight can be attached to the
circumstance that another poet, Occleve, who clearly regarded himself as
the disciple of one by many years his senior, in accordance with the
common phraseology of his (and, indeed, of other) times, spoke of the
older writer as his "father" and "father reverent." In a coloured portrait
carefully painted from memory by Occleve on the margin of a manuscript,
Chaucer is represented with grey hair and beard; but this could not of
itself be taken to contradict the supposition that he died about the age
of sixty. And Leland's assertion that Chaucer attained to old age self-
evidently rests on tradition only; for Leland was born more than a century
after Chaucer died. Nothing occurring in any of Chaucer's own works of
undisputed genuineness throws any real light on the subject. His poem,
the "House of Fame," has been variously dated; but at any period of his
manhood he might have said, as he says there, that he was "too old" to
learn astronomy, and preferred to take his science on faith. In the
curious lines called "L'Envoy de Chaucer a Scogan," the poet, while
blaming his friend for his want of perseverance in a love-suit, classes
himself among "them that be hoar and round of shape," and speaks of
himself and his Muse as out of date and rusty. But there seems no
sufficient reason for removing the date of the composition of these lines