other poems.

In a well-known roundel of his, the

line

'Since I fro Love escaped am so fat,'

occurs three times, and in the verses to Scogan, he says the reference being of course to Cupid

He wol nat weth his arwes been ywroken
On thee ne me, ne noon of your figure;

We shul of him have neyther hurte nor cure.

Now certes, frend, I drede of thyn unhappe,
Lest for thy gilte the wreche of love procede
On alle hem that ben hoor and round of shappe.'

It is unnecessary to add that fat was against all the canons of the court of love. One of the commandments in Chaucer's own "Court" is to fast.' It is equally contrary to the spirit of knighthood, and indeed, the soldierly spirit. In modern times the only people who must not get fat are jockeys; but in an earlier and sterner time the Gauls punished the soldier whose waist-belt protruded in the rank; we need not pursue the subject into trivialities of illustrations.

It is admitted on all hands that Chaucer must have been born of well-to-do parents, and that his education was that of a gentleman; but the strenuous manner in which he maintains, in more than one place in his writings, the truth that a man's rank is determined by what he is and does, and not by his birth, might be supposed to imply an oblique reference to

his own origin, if we did not know how uncertain such conclusions are. Chaucer's was a revolutionary age; it is difficult not to believe that the radicalism of those times was greatly in excess of any proof of it which remains; for there is a whiff or wind of social insurgence blowing through all its literature. The impression made upon my own mind is that Chaucer was the son of a court favourite, and a favourite himself; and if my fancy insists on adding other particulars with respect to his origin, I need not produce them here.

In the "Court of Love," the poet, speaking dramatically, says—

Philogenet I called am fer and nere,
Of Cambridge, clerke -,'

but of course we cannot infer positively that Chaucer
was ever at Cambridge University. It is asserted by
Leland that Chaucer was a clerk of Oxford (and that
he finished his education in Paris), and the frequent
references to Oxford and its neighbourhood in the
poet's writings, give some colour to this statement.
is believed that

The morall Gower and philosophical Strode,'

It

to whom Chaucer dedicates Troilus and Creseide were both educated at Oxford, and Godwin and others conjecture that the three men became acquainted at Oxford University. These uncertainties are so tedious

that I hardly know whether to repeat or not Speght's anecdote that Chaucer, being at that time a law student of the Inner Temple, was once fined two shillings for thrashing a Franciscan Friar in Fleet Street. Nothing is more likely than that Chaucer, when young and full of pluck, perhaps wine, should beat a friar ; and Leland confirms Speght in the statement that Chaucer had been a student in the college of the lawyers,' to say nothing of the fact that Mr. Buckley told Speght he had seen the record of the fine of two shillings in the Inner Temple. But on the other hand, Thynne, who ought to have known, asserts that 'lawyers were not of the Temple till the latter part of the reygne of Edward III.,' at which time the poet was in his maturity.

Up to August 1866 then it was safe for any biographer of the poet to state that there was no record of Chaucer's existence until 1359.

But in August 1866, Mr. Bond, through the Fortnightly Review, informed us that he had "lately" had the fortune to meet the name of Geoffrey Chaucer in some fragments of a contemporary Household Account; the fragments being two parchment leaves which had, some three or four centuries ago been pasted down to the covers of an ancient manuscript purchased a few years since by the British Museum, and now known as the Additional MS. 1862.' Mr. Bond goes on to say, that when the volume was rebound these fragments might have been cast away as worthless but

for a rule strictly observed in the British Museum of preserving every scrap of old writing, whether it appear valuable or not- -a circumstance which I mention merely for its intrinsic interest. The leaves, in being adapted to the purpose of lining the whole binding of the MS., had been mutilated and defaced, but Mr. Bond found them perfectly legible, and of the facts which they supply in reference to Chaucer the interest is extreme. Of course I shall not do Mr. Bond's ingenious paper the injustice of referring to it any further than my purpose requires. But the account was kept for the Countess Elizabeth, then the wife of Prince Lionel, who was the third son of King Edward III. The lady had herself been brought up by Queen Philippa, upon the choice of the king himself, and, at nine years old, she was betrothed to the young Prince Lionel. In 1352 she married him. Her mother was Maud, sister of Henry, first Duke of Lancaster. She seems to have lived at Hatfield, which was then royal property; but, like most royal or distinguished personages in those days (unless they were in prison), she seems to have been always moving about from one part of the country to another. During the three or four years over which the account extends, Mr. Bond finds her at Southampton, at Reading, at Stratford-le-Bow, at Campsey, at London again, at Woodstock, at Doncaster, at Windsor, at Hertford, at Anglesea, in Liverpool, in London again, at Reading again, in London again, ‘feeing the keepers

of the lions in the Tower,' and lastly, again at Hatfield. In the winter of 1357, John of Gaunt was apparently at Hatfield, for new-year's gifts are presented by the Countess to John of Gaunt's cook and clerk of the kitchen.' Now in April 1357, the lady is in London, preparing for the festival of Easter, and also for assisting at the feast of St. George, to be held at Windsor with great pomp, to celebrate the recent foundation of the Order of the Garter. At this time there is an entry in the account of a paltock, or short cloak, a pair of red and black breeches, and a pair of shoes,' for Geoffrey Chaucer. At the same time there are entries of articles of dress for Philippa Pan, which Mr. Bond thinks is probably a contraction for panetaria, or mistress of the pantry.

We have Chaucer's own testimony, given in the Scrope and Grosvenor Case, to the fact that in the year 1359 he fought under Edward III. in the French expedition, and was taken prisoner. What we gather in addition from Mr. Bond's discovery is, that it was in the retinue of Prince Lionel that the poet went to France. Of course, if he was born in 1328, he was thirty-one at this time; if Mr. Bond is right in fixing the date of his birth at about 1340, he was only nineteen. If Chaucer was born in 1340, he was married very early, for it is almost certain that he was ransomed upon the peace of Chartres in 1360; and it is nearly as certain that he was married to his wife Philippa in that year. There is scarcely the shadow of