and Chaucer, the son of merchants,
grows up among them. The English people no longer repair to Paris in
order to study, and Chaucer does not go either; their king wages war in
France, and Chaucer follows Edward along the military roads of that
country; they put more and more trust in Parliament, and Chaucer sits in
Parliament as member for Kent. They take an interest in things of
beauty, they are fond of the arts, and want them to be all aglow with
ornamentation and bright with smiles; Chaucer is clerk of the king's
works, and superintends the repairs and embellishments of the royal
palaces. Saxon monotony, the sadness that followed after Hastings, are
forgotten past memory; this new England knows how to laugh and also how
to smile; she is a merry England, with bursts of joy, and also an
England of legends, of sweet songs, and of merciful Madonnas. The
England of laughter and the England of smiles are both in Chaucer's
works.

I.

Chaucer's life exactly fills the period we have now come to, during
which the English people acquired their definitive characteristics: he
was born under Edward III. and he died shortly after the accession of
Henry of Lancaster. At that time Petrarch and Boccaccio were long since
dead, France had no poet of renown, and Chaucer was without comparison
the greatest poet of Europe.

His family belonged to the merchant class of the City. His father, John
Chaucer, his uncle, Thomas Heyroun, and other relations besides, were
members of the Corporation of Wine Merchants, or Vintners. John Chaucer
was purveyor to the Court, and he accompanied Edward III. on his first
expedition to the Continent: hence a connection with the royal family,
by which the future poet was to profit. The Chaucers' establishment was
situated in that Thames Street which still exists, but now counts only
modern houses; Geoffrey was probably born there in 1340, or a little
earlier.[448]

Chaucer spent the years of his childhood and youth in London: a London
which the great fire of 1666 almost totally destroyed, that old London,
then quite young, of which illuminated manuscripts have preserved to us
the picturesque aspect. The paternal house was near the river, and by
the side of the streamlet called Walbrook, since covered over, but which
then flowed in the open air. On the noble river, the waters of which
were perhaps not as blue as illuminators painted them, but which were
not yet the liquid mud we all know, ships from t