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:--

"Awake!" to me he said,
In voice and tone the very same
THAT USETH ONE WHO I COULD NAME;
And with that voice, sooth to say(n)
My mind returned to me again;
For it was goodly said to me;
So was it never wont to be.

In other words, the kindness of the voice reassured him that it was NOT
the same as that which he was wont to hear close to his pillow! Again,
the entire tone of the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women" is not
that of a happy lover; although it would be pleasant enough,
considering that the lady who imposes on the poet the penalty of
celebrating GOOD women is Alcestis, the type of faithful wifehood, to
interpret the poem as not only an amende honorable to the female sex in
general, but a token of reconciliation to the poet's wife in
particula