(unnecessarily) careful to tell us that his object in going forth was not
to "sing with the birds." He could not, like Chaucer, transfuse old
things into new, but there is enough in his character as a poet to explain
the friendship between the pair, of which we hear at the very time when
Gower was probably preparing his "Confessio Amantis" for publication.

They are said afterwards to have become enemies; but in the absence of any
real evidence to that effect we cannot believe Chaucer to have been likely
to quarrel with one whom he had certainly both trusted and admired. Nor
had literary life in England already advanced to a stage of development of
which, as in the Elizabethan and Augustan ages, literary jealousy was an
indispensable accompaniment. Chaucer is supposed to have attacked Gower
in a passage of the "Canterbury Tales," where he incidentally declares his
dislike (in itself extremely commendable) of a particular kind of
sensational stories, instancing the subject of one of the numerous tales
in the "Confessio Amantis." There is, however, no reason whatever for
supposing Chaucer to have here intended a reflection on his brother poet,
more especially as the "Man of Law," after uttering the censure, relates,
though probably not from Gower, a story on a subject of a different kind
likewise treated by him. It is scarcely more suspicious that when Gower,
in a second edition of his chief work, dedicated in 1393 to Henry, Earl of
Derby (afterwards Henry IV), judiciously omitted the exordium and altered
the close of the first edition, both of which were complimentary to
Richard II, he left out, together with its surrounding context, a passage
conveying a friendly challenge to Chaucer as a "disciple and poet of the
God of Love."

In any case there could have been no political difference between them,
for Chaucer was at all times in favour with the House of Lancaster,
towards whose future head Gower so early contrived to assume a correct