the King a spirit of patronage appropriate to the claims of literary
leisure. How remote such a notion was from the minds of Chaucer's
employers is proved by the terms of the patent by which, in the month of
June following, he was appointed Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidy of
wools, skins, and tanned hides in the port of London. This patent
(doubtless according to the usual official form) required him to write the
rolls of his office with his own hand, to be continually present there,
and to perform his duties in person and not by deputy. By a warrant of
the same month Chaucer was granted the pension of 10 pounds for life
already mentioned, for services rendered by him and his wife to the Duke
and Duchess of Lancaster and to the Queen; by two successive grants of the
year 1375 he received further pecuniary gratifications of a more or less
temporary nature; and he continued to receive his pension and allowance
for robes as one of the royal esquires. We may therefore conceive of him
as now established in a comfortable as well as seemingly secure position.
His regular work as comptroller (of which a few scattered documentary
vestiges are preserved) scarcely offers more points for the imagination to
exercise itself upon than Burns's excisemanship or Wordsworth's
collectorship of stamps (It is a curious circumstance that Dryden should
have received as a reward for his political services as a satirist, an
office almost identical with Chaucer's. But he held it for little more
than a year.), though doubtless it must have brought him into constant
contact with merchants and with shipmen, and may have suggested to him
many a broad descriptive touch. On the other hand, it is not necessary to
be a poet to feel something of that ineffable ennui of official life,
which even the self-compensatory practice of arriving late at one's desk,
but departing from it early, can only abate, but not take away. The
passage has been often quoted in which Chaucer half implies a feeling of
the kind, and tells how he sought recreation from what Charles Lamb would
have called his "works" at the Custom House in the reading, as we know he