o him on April 23rd, 1374, the
merry day of the Feast of St. George. It would of course be a mistake
to conclude, from any seeming analogies of later times, that this
grant, which was received by Chaucer in money-value, and which seems
finally to have been commuted for an annual payment of twenty marks,
betokened on the part of 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