hat Chaucer
fully shared the opinions and tendencies represented by his patron. In
the supposition that Chaucer approved of the countenance for a long
time shown by John of Gaunt to Wyclif there is nothing improbable;
neither, however, is there anything improbable in this other
supposition, that, when the Duke of Lancaster openly washed his hands
of the heretical tenets to the utterance of which Wyclif had advanced,
Chaucer, together with the large majority of Englishmen, held with the
politic duke rather than with the still unflinching Reformer. So long
as Wyclif's movement consisted only of an opposition to ecclesiastical
pretensions on the one hand, and of an attempt to revive religious
sentiment on the other, half the country or more was Wycliffite, and
Chaucer no doubt with the rest. But it would require positive evidence
to justify the belief that from this feeling Chaucer ever passed to
sympathy with LOLLARDRY, in the vague but sufficiently intelligible
sense attaching to that term in the latter part of Richard the Second's
reign. Richard II himself, whose patronage of Chaucer is certain, in
the end attempted rigorously to suppress Lollardry; and Henry IV, the
politic John of Gaunt's yet more politic son, to whom Chaucer owed the
prosperity enjoyed by him in the last year of his life, became a
persecutor almost as soon as he became a king.

Though, then, from the whole tone of his mind, Chaucer could not but
sympathise with the opponents of ecclesiastical domination--though, as
a man of free and critical spirit, and of an inborn ability for
penetrating beneath the surface, he could not but find subjects for
endless blame and satire in the members of those Mendicant Orders in
whom his chief patron's academical ally had recognised the most
formidable obstacles to the spread of pure religion--yet all this would
not justify us in regarding him as personally a Wycliffite. Indeed, we
might as well at once borrow the phraseology of a recent respectable
critic, and set down Dan Chaucer as a Puritan! The policy of his
patron tallied with the view which a fresh practical mind such as
Chaucer's would naturally be disposed to take of the influence of monks
and friars, or at least of those monks and friars whose vices and
foibles were specially prominent in his eyes. There are various
reasons why men oppose established institutions in the season of their
decay; but a fourteenth century satirist of the monks, or even of