the same time, this waking must have been is
manifest from what little is known concerning the course of both his
personal and his literary life during the next few years. But there is
a tide in the lives of poets, as in those of other men, on the use or
neglect of which their future seems largely to depend. For more
reasons than one Chaucer may have been rejoiced to be employed on the
two missions abroad, which apparently formed his chief occupation
during the years 1370-1373. In the first place, the love of books,
which he so frequently confesses, must in him have been united to a
love of seeing men and cities; few are observers of character without
taking pleasure in observing it. Of his literary labours he probably
took little thought during these years; although the visit which in the
course of them he paid to Italy may be truly said to have constituted
the turning-point in his literary life. No work of his can be ascribed
to this period with certainty; none of importance has ever been
ascribed to it.

On the latter of these missions Chaucer, who left England in the winter
of 1372, visited Genoa and Florence. His object at the former city was
to negotiate concerning the settlement of a Genoese mercantile factory
in one of our ports, for in this century there already existed between
Genoa and England a commercial intercourse, which is illustrated by the
obvious etymology of the popular term "jane" occurring in Chaucer in
the sense of any small coin. ("A jane" is in the "Clerk's Tale" said
to be a sufficient value at which to estimate the "stormy people") It
has been supposed that on this journey he met at Padua Petrarch, whose
residence was near by at Arqua. The statement of the "Clerk" in the
"Canterbury Tales" that he learnt the story of patient Griseldis "at
Padua of a worthy clerk...now dead," who was called "Francis Petrarch,
the laureate poet," may of course merely imply that Chaucer borrowed
the "Clerk's Tale" from Petrarch's Latin version of the original by
Boccaccio. But the meeting which the expression suggests may have
actually taken place, and may have been accompanied by the most
suitable conversation which the imagination can supply; while, on the
other hand, it is a conjecture unsupported by any evidence whatever,
that a previous meeting between the pair had occurred at Milan in 1368,
when Lionel Duke of Clarence was married to his second wife with great
pomp in the presence of Petrarch and