poetry and romance are more interesting and important than Middle English.
When we like and appreciate Chaucer--his poetry, his humor, his good
stories, his kind heart---it will be time enough to study his language.

LIFE OF CHAUCER. For our convenience the life of Chaucer is divided into
three periods. The first, of thirty years, includes his youth and early
manhood, in which time he was influenced almost exclusively by French
literary models. The second period, of fifteen years, covers Chaucer's
active life as diplomat and man of affairs; and in this the Italian
influence seems stronger than the French. The third, of fifteen years,
generally known as the English period, is the time of Chaucer's richest
development. He lives at home, observes life closely but kindly, and while
the French influence is still strong, as shown in the _Canterbury Tales_,
he seems to grow more independent of foreign models and is dominated
chiefly by the vigorous life of his own English people.

Chaucer's boyhood was spent in London, on Thames Street near the river,
where the world's commerce was continually coming and going. There he saw
daily the shipman of the _Canterbury Tales_ just home in his good ship
Maudelayne, with the fascination of unknown lands in his clothes and
conversation. Of his education we know nothing, except that he was a great
reader. His father was a wine merchant, purveyor to the royal household,
and from this accidental relation between trade and royalty may have arisen
the fact that at seventeen years Chaucer was made page to the Princess
Elizabeth. This was the beginning of his connection with the brilliant
court, which in the next forty years, under three kings, he was to know so
intimately.

At nineteen he went with the king on one of the many expeditions of the
Hundred Years' War, and here he saw chivalry and all the pageantry of
mediaeval war at the height of their outward splendor. Taken prisoner at the
unsuccessful siege of Rheims, he is said to have been ransomed by money out
of the royal purse. Returning to England, he became after a few years
squire of the royal household, the personal attendant and confidant of the
king. It was during this first period that he married a maid of honor to
the queen. This was probably Philippa Roet, sister to the wife of John of
Gaunt, the famous Duke of Lancaster. From numerous whimsical references in
his early poems, it has been thought that this marriage into a noble fam