might have been softened by the good offices of Anne of Bohemia, a princess never mentioned by Chaucer but in terms of the warmest panegyric.

While he was abroad, his circumstances had been impoverished by his liberality to some of his fellow fugitives; and his effects at home had been cruelly embezzled by those entrusted with their management, who endeavoured, as he tells us, to make him perish for absolute want.

In 1388, while yet a prisoner, he was obliged to dispose of his two pensions, which were all the resources now left to him by his persecutors. As the price of his release from imprisonment, he was obliged to make a confession respecting the late conspiracy. It is not known what he revealed; certainly nothing to the prejudice of John of Gaunt, since that prince continued to be his friend.

To his acknowledged partizans, who had betrayed and tried to starve him during his banishment, he owed no fidelity. It is true, that extorted evidence is one of the last ransoms which a noble mind would wish to pay for liberty; but before we blame Chaucer for making any confession, we should consider how fair and easy the lessons of uncapitulating fortitude may appear on the outside of prison, and yet how hard it may be to read them by the light of a dungeon. As far as dates can be guessed at in so obscure a transaction, his liberation took place after Richard had shaken off the domineering party of Gloucester, and had begun to act for himself.

Chaucer's political errors and he considered his share in the late conspiracy as errors of judgment, though not of intention-had been committed while Richard was a minor, and the acknowledgment of them might seem less humiliating when made to the monarch himself, than to an usurping faction ruling in his name. He was charged too, by his loyalty, to make certain disclosures important to the peace of the kingdom; and his duty as a subject, independent of personal considerations, might well be put in competition with ties to associates already broken by their treachery'.

While in prison, he began a prose work entitled The Testament of Love, in order to beguile the tedium of a confinement, which made every hour, he says, appear to him an hundred winters; and he seems to have published it to allay the obloquy attendant on his misfortunes, as an explanation of his past conduct. It is an allegory, in imitation of Boethius's Consolations of Philosophy; an universal favourite in the early literature of Europe. Never was an obscure affair conveyed in a more obscure apology; yet amidst the gloom of allegory and lamentation, the vanity of the poet sufficiently breaks out. It is the goddess of Love who visits him in his confinement, and accosts him as her own immor

1 "For my trothe and my conscience," he says in his Testament of Love," bene witnesse to me bothe, that this knowing sothe have I saide for troathe of my leigiaunce by which I was charged on my kinges behalfe."

tal bard. He descants to her on his own misfortunes, on the politics of London, and on his devotion to the Lady Marguerite, or pearl, whom he found in a muscle shell, and who turns out at last to mean the spiritual comfort of the Church1.

In 1389 the Duke of Lancaster returned from Spain, and he had once more a steady protector. In that year he was appointed clerk of the works at Westminster, and in the following year clerk of those at Windsor, with a salary of £36 per annum. His resignation of those offices, which it does not appear he held for more than twenty months, brings us to the sixty-fourth year of his age, when he retired to the country, most probably to Woodstock, and there composed his immortal Canterbury Tales, amidst the scenes which had inspired his youthful genius.

In 1394 a pension of £20 a year was granted to him, and in the last year of Richard's reign he had a grant of a yearly tun of wine, we may suppose in lieu of the daily pitcher, which had been stopped during his misfortunes.

Tradition assigns to our poet a residence in his old age at Donnington Castle, near Newbury, in Berkshire; to which he must have moved in 1897,

1 Mr. Todd has given, in his Illustrations, some poems supposed to be written by Chaucer during his imprisonment; in which, in the same allegorical manner, under the praises of Spring, he appears to implore the assistance of Vere, Earl of Oxford, the principal favourite of Richard II.

if he ever possessed that mansion: but Mr. Grose, who affirms that he purchased Donnington Castle in that year, has neglected to show the documents of such a purchase. One of the most curious particulars in the latter part of his life is the patent of protection granted to Chaucer in the year 1398, which his former inaccurate biographers had placed in the second year of Richard, till Mr. Tyrwhitt corrected the mistaken date. The deed has been generally supposed to refer to the poet's creditors; as it purports, however, to protect him contra aemulos suos, the expression has led Mr. Godwin to question its having any relation to his debtors and creditors. It is true that rivals or competitors are not the most obvious designation for the creditors of a great poet; but still, as the law delights in fictions, and as the writ for securing a debtor exhibits at this day such figurative personages as John Doe and Richard Roe, the form of protection might in those times. have been equally metaphorical; nor, as a legal metonymy, are the terms rival and competitor by any means inexpressive of that interesting relation which subsists between the dun and the fugitive; a relation which in all ages has excited the warmest emulation, and the promptest ingenuity of the human mind. Within a year and a half from the date of this protection, Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt, ascended the throne of England by the title of Henry IV.

It is creditable to the memory of that prince, that

however basely he abandoned so many of his father's friends, he did not suffer the poetical ornament of the age to be depressed by the revolution. Chaucer's annuity and pipe of wine were continued under the new reign, and an additional pension of forty marks a year was conferred upon him. But the poet did not long enjoy this accession to his fortune. He died in London, on the twenty-fifth of October, 1400, and was interred in the south cross aisle of Westminster Abbey. The monument to his memory was erected a century and a half after his decease, by a warm admirer of his genius, Nicholas Brigham, a gentleman of Oxford. It stands at the north end of a recess formed by four obtuse foliated arches, and is a plain altar with three quatrefoils and the same number of shields. Chaucer, in his Treatise of the Astrolabe, mentions his son Lewis, for whom it was composed in 1391, and who was at that time ten years of age. Whether Sir Thomas Chaucer, who was Speaker of the House of Commons in the reign of Henry IV. was another and elder son of the poet, as many of his biographers have supposed, is a point which has not been distinctly ascertained.

Mr. Tyrwhitt has successfully vindicated Chaucer from the charge brought against him by Verstegan and Skinner, of having adulterated English by vast importations of French words and phrases. If Chaucer had indeed naturalized a multitude of French words by his authority, he might be regarded as a