Ports of GREAT BRITAIN. Volume the Firft. LONDON. Printed for John Arthur Arch, 23.6ricecburch Street: THE LIFE OF CHAUCER. In the beginning of the eleventh century, our vernacular poetry received from the Normans, the rudiments of that cultivation which it has preserved to the present times. In the two fucceeding centuries, the principal efforts of our yet untutored verfifiers, were rhyming chronicles and metrical romances, the style of which was rough, and the harmony of the numbers very defective. In the reign of Edward I., the character of our poetical composition was confiderably changed, by the introduction and increase of the tales of chivalry, and the popular fables of the troubadours of Provence. Fictitious adventures were then substituted by the minstrels in the place of hiftorical and traditionary facts, and a taste for ornamental and exotic expreffion gradually prevailed over the rude fimplicity of the native English phraseology. These fabulous narratives, afterwards enlarged by kindred fancies, derived from the crufades, and enriched by the marvellous machinery of the Italian poets, formed the taste, and awakened the imagination of GEOFFREY CHAUCER, the illuftrious ornament of the reign of Edward III. and of his fucceffor Richard II., the father of the English heroic verfe, and the first English verfifier who wrote poetically. Of the great poet, with whofe compofitions this collection of claffical English poetry commences, the curiosity which his reputation must excite, will require more ample information than can now be given. His contemporaries, who reverenced his genius, recorded few particulars of his life: and all who have fince written of him, relate nothing beyond what casual mention, uncertain tradition, and discordant conjecture, have supplied. This meagre nartation, therefore, scarcely merits the title that is given to it; but the materials for a fuller account are not to be found, without supplying the deficiency of facts by the comments and inventions of his biographers, which have nothing to recommend them to credit but the single circumftance of being often repeated. The birth of Chaucer, in 1328, has been fettled, from the inscription on his tomb-ftone, fignifying that he died in 1400, in the 7zd year of his age. Of the place of his nativity there is no memorial, any more than of his parents. Bale fays he was a Berkshireman; Pits would entitle Woodstock in Oxfordshire to his birth; and Camden affirms that London was his birth-place: "Edmund Spenfer," fays he, "a Londoner, was fo fmiled on by the Muses at his birth, that he excelled all the English poets that went before him, if we except only his fellow citizen Chaucer." But Chaucer himself seems to have determined the point. In his Teftament of Love, he calls himself a Londonois or Londoner, and speaks of the city of London as the place of his engendrure. His defcent has been variously affigned. Leland fays that he was of a noble stock; Pits, that he was the son of a knight; Speght, that his father was a vintner; and Hearne, that he was a merchant. This difference of opinion fhews, that nothing can be said with any tolerable affurance of his family; but the patronymic name feems to indicate, that it came originally from Normandy; and there is somewhat more probability of his being the son of a gentleman rather than of a tradesman. 3 2 |
