e second cause is this: that truly it seems better to me
to write unto a child twice a good sentence, than to forget it once."

Unluckily we know nothing further of Lewis--not even whether, as has
been surmised, he died before he had been able to turn to lucrative
account his calculating powers, after the fashion of his apocryphal
brother Thomas or otherwise.

Though by the latter part of the year 1391 Chaucer had lost his
Clerkship of the Works, certain payments (possibly of arrears) seem
afterwards to have been made to him in connexion with the office. A
very disagreeable incident of his tenure of it had been a double
robbery from his person of official money, to the very serious extent
of twenty pounds. The perpetrators of the crime were a notorious gang
of highwaymen, by whom Chaucer was, in September, 1390, apparently on
the same day, beset both at Westminster, and near to "the foul Oak" at
Hatcham in Surrey. A few months afterwards he was discharged by writ
from repayment of the loss to the Crown. His experiences during the
three years following are unknown; but in 1394 (when things were fairly
quiet in England) he was granted an annual pension of twenty pounds by
the King. This pension, of which several subsequent notices occur,
seems at times to have been paid tardily or in small instalments, and
also to have been frequently anticipated by Chaucer in the shape of
loans of small sums. Further evidence of his straits is to be found in
his having, in the year 1398, obtained letters of protection against
arrest, making him safe for two years. The grant of a tun of wine in
October of the same year is the last favour known to have been extended
to Chaucer by King Richard II. Probably no English sovereign has been
more diversely estimated, both by his contemporaries and by posterity,
than this ill-fated prince, in the records of whose career many
passages betokening high spirit strangely contrast with the impotence
of its close. It will at least be remembered in his favour that he was
a patron of the arts; and that after Froissart had been present at his
christening, he received, when on the threshold of manhood, the homage
of Gower, and on the eve of his downfall showed most seasonable
kindness to a poet far greater than either of these. It seems scarcely
justifiable to assign to any particular point of time the "Ballade sent
to King Richard" by Chaucer; but its manifest intention was to apprise
the king of