claring the forfeiture of their estates or temporalities and banishing them forever from the country. The Lord Chief Justice Tresilian and Sir Nicholas Brembre met a harder fate and died on the gallows at Tyburn. The under-sheriff of Middlesex, Thomas Usk, fell by the executioner's hand, and his head was placed as a warning over Newgate prison. Chief Justice Bealknap, and five other judges concerned in the unsuccessful coup d'état, had the death sentence commuted, on the personal intercession of the Primate and all the other bishops, into banishment to Ireland with loss of goods and office. The king's confessor, the bishop of Chichester, shared their fate. Universal sympathy was excited for the fate of the last victims of this partisan justice; four of the king's trusty servants, viz., Sir Simon Burley, John Beauchamp, John Salisbury, and Jacob Berners, in spite of all the efforts of the king and Queen Anne, were put to death with the sword, or in a still more cruel manner, in May, 1388. All this must have affected Chaucer's mind most deeply. He had known so many of the men, whose tragic fate was now accomplished, in the days of their prosperity and splendor; some of them were personally intimate with him, their names were associated with affairs and events which belonged to a happy period of his own life. Sir Nicholas Brembre, who was so deeply entangled in Richard's reckless enterprise, had been several times Lord Mayor of London, and only a short time since was Chaucer's colleague as royal receiver of customs in London. Sir Simon Burley, an approved old servant of Edward III. and the Black Prince, and tutor of the young Richard, had conducted the negotiations for his marriage with Anne of Bohemia; the tears of the queen and the prayers of the king were not able to save him now from a traitor's death. What a dismal aftermath to the lovely idyl in the Parlement of Foules! Death had in the meantime also deprived Chaucer of his wife. Whatever the married relations between the two may have been, the departure of the mother of his children cannot have been without effect on the poet's heart, especially at a time of the deepest and most painful excitement. To all these sorrows came the cares for daily bread, pressing embarrassments for want of money. By the loss of his wife Chaucer was seriously curtailed in his income. It was rightly interpreted as a sign of great distress when he made over the two pensions which he drew as a court official to a certain John Scalby on May 1, 1388. In his necessity he probably sold him the pension. And thus, in the period we are now describing, Chaucer had to experience the serious, the sad, and the terrible at one and the same time. All this, indeed, was not able to break his vital energy; but it could damp his joy in life for a time, and for a short period frightened humor from his side. The gay and worldly poet felt himself driven to serious contemplation and to an earnest introspection into his own inner world, and at first his feelings may have again taken a decidedly religious coloring. Such feelings seem to show themselves by a kind of intermittent echo in the poems he wrote immediately afterwards, but otherwise we can scarcely observe any interruption in Chaucer's productiveness. Their subject is the glorification of maidenly purity, womanly patience and devotion-themes which are closely related Cupid's Legend of the Saints. to The Tale of Virginia, written in heroic, short rhyming couplets, reminds us strongly of that work. In subject it is closely allied to the Legend of Lucretia, while its manner of treatment resembles still more the style observed in other parts of that collection. But the exposition of the minute characterization and of the heroine's portrait, with its broad rhetorical ornamentation, has received a peculiar coloring. Chaucer took some essential traits for this portion from the second part of the Romance of the Rose. And though he quotes Livy, in the story he unfortunately follows the mutilated and vulgar tradition such as he found it in Jehan de Meung; in this version, among other things, Virginius cuts off the head of his own daughter and brings it to the unjust judge Appius. The fidelity to nature which breaks forth in some passages in Chaucer's poem-especially touching is the dialogue between father and daughter-can neither remove nor cover the consequences of that fundamental mistake. The deep religious earnestness in which the idea of chastity is here conceived is characteristic of the period in which Virginia was composed; in a most peculiar manner, and with impressive exhortations she addresses female-educators and parents to preserve and cultivate by rigorous training this precious jewel of chastity in their children.* The poet's pedagogic zeal even carried him on to use plain and drastic comparisons such as popular preachers were accustomed to employ ; † although the context of the passages where they occur, and the character of the whole poem, most decidedly exclude the intention of producing any comic effect. The concluding words of the tale, which refer to the punishment of the guilty and particularly to the end of the unjust judge, might very well have been written under the impression of the tragic events of which Chaucer had been a witness in the first half of the year 1388: Beware, for no man knows how God will smite, in any rank, nor in what way the worm of conscience may cause the wicked life to tremble, though it be so secret that no one know of it but himself and God." 66 Chaucer made a lucky hit in his Griselda. We may assume that the story is well known-it is related to the contents of the Lai le Fresne, as well as to the ScottishDanish ballad of Beautiful Anne. Boccaccio reproduced it with much grace in his Decamerone, where the tale, as last in the series, happily contrasts with the light tone and roguish or even frivolous character of most of the other romances. Boccaccio's art, however, is not able to remove from the reader of to-day the displeasure, or, indeed, the feeling of revolt, produced by the overdone description of the delicate question. It requires a certain abstraction from the reality of the moral world around us, We can conceive how Chaucer, who had hardly found time to care much about the religious and moral education of his children, must have felt himself reminded of the responsibility reposing on parents or teachers just at this time when his own children had lost their mother. + Compare line 83 and following (Canterbury Tales, Tyrwhitt, 12,017, etc.): "A thief of vension, that hath forlaft ter. to experience the pure effect of Griselda's touching characThe enjoyment of this story was easier to the Middle Ages, which were so accustomed to abstractions of every kind, and which might turn aside for once with pleasure from the extravagant conceits of lady-worship and the picture of uncomely types of women, such as the satirists and fabliaux poets described them. And thus we can understand how the story so delighted Petrarch that he translated it from Italian into Latin. This work was a child of his old age—the letter to Boccaccio in which he inclosed it is dated June 8, 1373, the last year that he saw to the end. Petrarch changed nothing in the material of the story, but in many places he extended the description, and gave to the whole a less simple but stronger rhetorical coloring. The Italian novelle has more unconstrained grace; the Latin version, where many of the additions seem inspired by deep feeling, brings out the fundamental idea more clearly. This circumstance, joined to the reverence that Chaucer felt for Petrarch's "sweet rhetoric" and "high style," may have decided him to follow the copy instead of the original. Chaucer's relation to the subject, as to the author, also explains the choice of the seven-lined stanza instead of the heroic rhyming couplet for the form of his poem, as well as the narrow limits within which he shows in this case his originality. In all essential points he follows Petrarch; whose rhetoric, however, appears subdued in the simpler, more familiar and homely manner of expression of the English poet, and is turned into poetry by the artistic form of his verse. The story of Griselda does not belong to those works upon which the Father of English poetry has impressed the stamp of his mastery; but nowhere do we hear the tender tones of his feelings sound more sweetly; nowhere do we see so plainly the poet's leaning to what is truly womanly, as in the affecting song of this unchangeable, loving, quiet sufferer. Among the few additions of Chaucer's own, there is one passage of especial beauty. Griselda has to quit her husband's house, and can only take back with her what she brought at first from her father's home. "I know well," she says, in her departing speech, "that my whole dowry consisted in wretched old clothes, which were now hard to find." At this she is overcome with the feeling of the contrast between that time and now-' "Oh, good God, how gentle and how kind you seemed by your speech and your looks on that day when our marriage was made." Another passage intercalated by Chaucer may be mentioned, as it is perhaps indicative of the time when the poem was composed. The enthusiastic reception given to Griselda's daughter, as the pretended new bride of the Marquis, by the same people who had formerly received the mother with acclamation, and who only a short time before had so strongly condemned the wayward cruelty of her husband, forces the poet to the following bitter address which he puts into the mouth "of the sober people of that town": 1 O stormy people, unsad 1 and ever untrue, 1 Unsteady. 2 Rumor. A small coin (from Genoa). * Judgment. 5 Proveth. • Believeth. Who can here help thinking of the grand reception. prepared for Richard in London on November 10, 1387, by the same citizens who only a few months previously had sided violently with his opponents, and whose party they were soon afterward again to join-" quia mobiles erant ut arundo, et nunc cum dominis, nunc cum rege, nusquam stabiles," says a contemporary historian ?† XI. Shortly after the completion of Griselda, Chaucer again experienced the inconstancy of popular favor. The government of Gloucester and his associates had at last become thoroughly hated; as they had no good results *The Clerk's Tale, vi. l. 57, ff. Tyrwhitt, Cant. Tales, 8871, ff. |