national life, which we can never hope to understand more than partially
and imperfectly. And it is this, taken together with the fact that he is
the first English poet to read whom is to enjoy him, and that he garnished
not only our language but our literature with blossoms still adorning them
in vernal freshness,--which makes Chaucer's figure so unique a one in the
gallery of our great English writers, and gives to his works an interest
so inexhaustible for the historical as well as for the literary student.


CHAPTER 2. CHAUCER'S LIFE AND WORKS.

Something has been already said as to the conflict of opinion concerning
the period of Geoffrey Chaucer's birth, the precise date of which is very
unlikely ever to be ascertained. A better fortune has attended the
anxious enquiries which in his case, as in those of other great men have
been directed to the very secondary question of ancestry and descent,--a
question to which, in the abstract at all events, no man ever attached
less importance than he. Although the name "Chaucer" is (according to
Thynne), to be found on the lists of Battle Abbey, this no more proves
that the poet himself came of "high parage," than the reverse is to be
concluded from the nature of his coat-of-arms, which Speght thought must
have been taken out of the 27th and 28th Propositions of the First Book of
Euclid. Many a warrior of the Norman Conquest was known to his comrades
only by the name of the trade which he had plied in some French or Flemish
town, before he attached himself a volunteer to Duke William's holy and
lucrative expedition; and it is doubtful whether even in the fourteenth
century the name "Le Chaucer" is, wherever it occurs in London, used as a
surname, or whether in some instances it is not merely a designation of
the owner's trade. Thus we should not be justified in assuming a French
origin for the family from which Richard le Chaucer, whom we know to have