r with a
few references to him in the writings of his contemporaries or
immediate successors. Which of his works are to be accepted as
genuine, necessarily forms the subject of an antecedent enquiry, such
as cannot with any degree of safety be conducted except on principles
far from infallible with regard to all the instances to which they have
been applied, but now accepted by the large majority of competent
scholars. Thus, by a process which is in truth dulness and dryness
itself except to patient endeavour stimulated by the enthusiasm of
special literary research, a limited number of results has been safely
established, and others have at all events been placed beyond
reasonable doubt. Around a third series of conclusions or conjectures
the tempest of controversy still rages; and even now it needs a wary
step to pass without fruitless deviations through a maze of assumptions
consecrated by their longevity, or commended to sympathy by the fervour
of personal conviction.

A single instance must suffice to indicate both the difficulty and the
significance of many of those questions of Chaucerian biography which,
whether interesting or not in themselves, have to be determined before
Chaucer's life can be written. They are not "all and some" mere
antiquarians' puzzles, of interest only to those who have leisure and
inclination for microscopic enquiries. So with the point immediately
in view. It has been said with much force that Tyrwhitt, whose
services to the study of Chaucer remain uneclipsed by those of any
other scholar, would have composed a quite different biography of the
poet, had he not been confounded by the formerly (and here and there
still) accepted date of Chaucer's birth, the year 1328. For the
correctness of this date Tyrwhitt "supposed" the poet's tombstone in
Westminster Abbey to be the voucher; but the slab placed on a pillar
near his grave (it is said at the desire of Caxton), appears to have
merely borne a Latin inscription without any dates; and the marble
monument erected in its stead "in the name of the Muses" by Nicolas
Brigham in 1556, while giving October 25th, 1400, as the day of
Chaucer's death, makes no mention either of the date of his birth or of
the number of years to which he attained, and, indeed, promises no more
information than it gives. That Chaucer's contemporary, the poet
Gower, should have referred to him in the year 1392 as "now in his days
old," is at best a very vague