citations of the Duke, who first made her his mistress, and afterwards married her. The Duke's regard for Chaucer and his wife was evinced by substantial gifts. In 1372, he conferred upon Philippa Chaucer a pension of 10l. per annum; and on different occasions presented her with valuable presents, besides bestowing other marks of his favour and protection on her husband and children.

In 1367, Chaucer was made one of the valets of the King's chamber; and in the same year the King granted him an annual salary of twenty marks for life, till he should be otherwise provided for, under the designation of 'dilectus Valettus noster,' which Selden says 'was conferred on young heirs designed to be knighted, or young gentlemen of great descent or quality." Chaucer appears to have been absent from England, on the King's service, in the summer of 1370; and towards the end of 1372 he was joined in a commission with two citizens of Genoa, for the purpose of determining upon an English port where a Genoese commercial establishment might be formed. An advance of 66l. 13s. 4d. having been made to him on the 1st of December, on account of his expenses, he is supposed to have left England immediately after; and all that is actually known of his mission, observes Sir Harris Nicolas, drawing his information from the entries in the Issue Rolls, is that he visited Florence and Genoa, and that he certainly returned to England before the 22nd November, 1373, on which day he received his pension in person.

It was during his visit to Italy on this occasion that Chaucer is said to have visited Petrarch at Padua, a supposition derived from a passage in the Prologue to the Clerk of Oxenford's Tale, in which the narrator says that he

1 There is much confusion in the early biographies in this matter. Urry says that Chaucer was soon after made Gentleman of the King's Privy Chamber, that an additional pension of twenty marks was bestowed upon him, and that he was subsequently appointed Shieldbearer to the King. The whole of these statements appear to have originated in the grant and appointment above-mentioned, which alone is sustained by evidence.

'learned' the tale of Griselda from a 'worthy clerk' st Padua, Fraunceis Petrark, the laureat poete.' If Chaucer had made this statement in his own person, which, undoubtedly, the structure of The Canterbury Tales afforded him the opportunity of doing, there could be no grounds for any discussion as to its truth; but having made it through the medium of a fictitious character, and not in his own person, the fact of such an interview having ever taken place has been called into question. Whether the reasoning founded upon the manner in which Chaucer thought fit to communicate the tale is sufficiently satisfactory to discredit the source to which he refers it, every reader must be considered competent to decide for himself. Upon this point, however, it may be well to observe that a distinction should be drawn between that which is given as fiction and that which is stated as reality; and that when Chaucer alludes to a real person in the introduction to the story, he so far departs from the dramatic assumption maintained in the rest of the prologue. As it is clear that the Clerk of Oxenford, being purely an imaginary personage, could not have learned the story at Padua from Petrarch, the difficulty becomes narrowed to a choice of two very obvious alternatives:-we must believe either that the whole statement is an invention, for which no intelligible reason can be assigned, and which is, certainly, on the face of it improbable; or that Chaucer himself obtained the story from Petrarch.

Several circumstances tend to strengthen this latter conclusion, which acquires additional force from the absence of a single particle of evidence against it. Petrarch was at Arqua, near Padua, when Chaucer is known to have been at Florence. There was nothing to prevent Chaucer from visiting Petrarch; while, on the other hand, it is extremely likely that he would have desired such a meeting. That his visit to Padua should not be found recorded in the Issue Rolls cannot be alleged as a ground of doubt, because the Rolls mention none of the places he visited except Florence and Genoa, to which cities he appears to have gone on the

business of his mission. The time when Petrarch made the Latin translation of the tale of Griselda from the Decamero: (which translation is supposed to have furnished Chauce. with the story), cannot be fixed with precision; but it is needless to enter upon a discussion of dates which are not disputed, for the purpose of showing that the translation was made before the period of the supposed meeting. If Sir Harris Nicolas's opinion that Chaucer was not acquainted with Italian (an opinion which most readers of Chaucer's poetry will agree with Mr. Wright in rejecting), could be admitted to be well-founded, it would help still further to sustain the inference that Chaucer did not get the story from the Decameron, but from a Latin source, and, therefore, most probably, from Petrarch's translation. But it is not necessary to establish this inference in order to support the supposition that he procured the story from Petrarch. It does not seem very certain from the language of the Clerk that he obtained it from a translation, or from a writing of any kind, but rather from word of mouth. He tells us distinctly enough that he learned' it of a worthy clerk,' and again that 'this worthy man taught' him the tale. It is true that towards the conclusion of the tale he tells us that Petrarchwriteth this storie,' a circumstance which does not invalidate the presumption that Chaucer may have learned it orally from Petrarch. Upon this point, a note (which has escaped the vigilance of Chaucer's biographers) made by Petrarch upon his translation, may be thought to possess some interest. Petrarch observes, in reference to the story of Griselda, that 'he had heard it many years before'—that is, before Boccaccio had made it the subject of one of the novels of the Decameron. As it thus appears that he was well acquainted with the story, which was, in all probability, a popular legend, hə might consequently have related the substance of it to Chaucer, before he had made his translation of the novel, or before he had even seen the Decameron. The allusion by the Clerk of Oxenford to the fact that Petrarch had written the story, does not necessarily imply that Chaucer received it

in that shape; because The Canterbury Tales were not composed till many years after Petrarch's death, when the translation must have been generally known.' The omission, also, of all notice of Boccaccio, to whom Chaucer had been largely indebted, not only in The Canterbury Tales, but upon other occasions, although not in itself conclusive, is, at least, a suggestive element in the case. If Petrarch had communicated the story as having derived it himself from Boccaccio, it may be presumed that Chaucer would have made some reference to its original source. That he has not acknowledged his obligations to Boccaccio elsewhere is nothing to the purpose; for in those instances he makes no acknowledgment whatever, while here he goes out of his way to make an explicit avowal of his authority.

The only object of sifting such points as these is to exhaust the speculations that present themselves in the course of the inquiry, and to reduce a question of some literary interest to its exact limits. The result is clear and simple. There are no proofs that Chaucer and Petrarch met at Padua; nor is there, on the other hand, any constructive or collateral evidence, as to time, place, or circumstances, to show that such a meeting was impossible, or even unlikely. The fact rests altogether on Chaucer's own testimony, given in the person of the Clerk of Oxenford, and the precision of that testimony should not be overlooked in weighing the amount of credit to which it is entitled. The Clerk does not say in general terms that he obtained the story from Petrarch, but that he learned it from him at Padua. A statement so particular carries at all events the appearance of being intended to apply to an actual occurrence, and not to a fictitious incident.

The death of the Duchess Blanche in 1369 supplied Chaucer with the subject of his poem called The Book of the Duchess, known in the early editions by the less appropriate

1 Petrarch died in July, 1374, and the earliest date assigned to The Canterbury Tales is subsequent to 1386.

title of The Dream of Chaucer. Mr. Godwin thinks that, from the tenor of this poem, we may conclude with certainty that Chaucer was unmarried when he wrote it;' a fact in which he is confirmed by the discovery that Philippa Picard, who, he says, was unquestionably' the wife of Chaucer, received a pension from the King in her maiden name in 1370, and, therefore, could not have been married to Chaucer till afterwards. This is a characteristic sample of the errors into which the imaginative biographers of Chaucer have fallen; errors which they frequently endeavour to support by trains of reasoning that commit them to still more extrava. gant hypotheses. Thus, in order to account for the singular circumstance of the daughter of Sir Payne Roet not bearing her father's name, Mr. Godwin informs us that it was very common in France for persons to have 'two' surnames (which there is no evidence whatever to show was the case with the lady in question), and that, consequently, brothers and sisters 'often exhibited in their ordinary signatures no token of relationship.' It is almost superfluous to observe that this statement, whatever it may be otherwise worth, is only waste of ingenious speculation in reference to the Roet family, who were natives of Germany, and, therefore, not governed by the customs of France. Believing that he had found in Chaucer's poems some grounds for the opinion that the poet had been ten years a suitor to this Philippa Picard, Mr. Godwin thinks it necessary to explain why she did not marry him sooner; and then he proceeds to assign the reason. He takes it for granted that she could not have been indifferent to the pretensions of so accomplished a lover; but,' he adds, not in the language of inference or supposition, but as if it were an ascertained fact, she could not resolve to quit the service of her royal mistress.' The main topic of her objection,' however, having been removed by the death of the Queen, Mr. Godwin tells us that their nuptials were celebrated as soon as the general laws of decorum, and the ideas of female delicacy, would alle."