e of that movement he shows a very
incomplete consciousness. But of the health and strength which, after
struggles many and various, made that movement possible and made it
victorious, he, more than any one of his contemporaries, is the living
type and the speaking witness. Thus, like the times to which he
belongs, he stands half in and half out of the Middle Ages, half in and
half out of a phase of our national life, which we can never hope to
understand more than partially and imperfectly. And it is this, taken
together with the fact that he is the first English poet to read whom
is to enjoy him, and that he garnished not only our language but our
literature with blossoms still adorning them in vernal
freshness,--which makes Chaucer's figure so unique a one in the gallery
of our great English writers, and gives to his works an interest so
inexhaustible for the historical as well as for the literary student.

CHAPTER 2. CHAUCER'S LIFE AND WORKS.

Something has been already said as to the conflict of opinion
concerning the period of Geoffrey Chaucer's birth, the precise date of
which is very unlikely ever to be ascertained. A better fortune has
attended the anxious enquiries which in his case, as in those of other
great men have been directed to the very secondary question of ancestry
and descent,--a question to which, in the abstract at all events, no
man ever attached less importance than he. Although the name "Chaucer"
is (according to Thynne), to be found on the lists of Battle Abbey,
this no more proves that the poet himself came of "high parage," than
the reverse is to be concluded from the nature of his coat-of-arms,
which Speght thought must have been taken out of the 27th and 28th
Propositions of the First Book of Euclid. Many a warrior of the Norman
Conquest was known to his comrades only by the name of the trade which
he had plied in some French or Flemish town, before he attached himself
a volunteer to Duke William's holy and lucrative expedition; and it is
doubtful whether even in the fourteenth century the name "Le Chaucer"
is, wherever it occurs in London, used as a surname, or whether in some
instances it is not merely a designation of the owner's trade. Thus we
should not be justified in assuming a French origin for the family from
which Richard le Chaucer, whom we know to have been the poet's
grandfather, was descended. Whether or not he was at any time a
shoemaker (chaucier, maker of cha