attitude. To him--a man of substance, with landed property in three
counties--the rays of immediate court-favour were probably of less
importance than to Chaucer; but it is not necessity only which makes
courtiers of so many of us: some are born to the vocation, and Gower
strikes one as naturally more prudent and cautious--in short, more of a
politic personage--than Chaucer. He survived him eight years--a blind
invalid, in whose mind at least we may hope nothing dimmed or blurred the
recollection of a friend to whom he owes much of his fame.

In a still nearer relationship,--on which the works of Chaucer that may
certainly or probably be assigned to this period throw some light,--it
seems impossible to describe him as having been fortunate. Whatever may
have been the date and circumstances of his marriage, it seems, at all
events in its later years, not to have been a happy one. The allusions to
Chaucer's personal experience of married life in both "Troilus And
Cressid" and the "House of Fame" are not of a kind to be entirely
explicable by that tendency to make a mock of women and of marriage, which
has frequently been characteristic of satirists, and which was specially
popular in an age cherishing the wit of Jean de Meung, and complacently
corroborating its theories from naughty Latin fables, French fabliaux, and
Italian novelle. Both in "Troilus And Cressid" and in the "House of Fame"
the poet's tone, when he refers to himself, is generally dolorous; but
while both poems contain unmistakeable references to the joylessness of
his own married life, in the latter he speaks of himself as "suffering
debonairly,"--or, as we should say, putting a good face upon--a state
"desperate of all bliss." And it is a melancholy though half sarcastic
glimpse into his domestic privacy which he incidentally, and it must be
allowed rather unnecessarily, gives in the following passage of the same
poem:--