THE CANTERBURY TALES OF CHAUCER. TO WHICH ARE ADDED, AN ESSAY ON HIS LANGUAGE AND VERSIFICATION, EDINBURGH: JAMES NICHOL LONDON: JAMES NISBET & CO. DUBLIN: W. ROBERTSON. M.DCCC.LX. 280. p. 97. THE THE LIFE OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER. GEOFFREY, GEFFREY, or JEFFREY CHAUCER, the Father of English Poetry, and, with the exceptions of Shakspeare and Milton, perhaps the greatest name as yet inscribed on its roll, was born in London, in the year 1328. We learn the former fact from his "Testament of Love," a prose production of his, where he speaks of himself as a Londoner, and of London as the place of his "kindly engendrure;" and the second from the inscription on his tombstone, which intimates that he died in 1400, at the age of seventy-two. Others have maintained that he was born in Oxfordshire or Berkshire. But surely we may lay it down as an axiom that a man seldom is mistaken about the place of his own birth; unless, indeed, we may suppose, as one of his editors asserts, that he lived till 1440, and had perhaps fallen into dotage! The year in which he was born was the second of the reign of Edward III.; and he appeared on the stage of time four years after the birth of his great contemporary, John Wickliffe. It has been truly remarked, in reference to the obscurity which hangs around all the history of Chaucer, that "considering the figure he made in the world during his lifetime, not only in a literary, but also in a political point of view, and the rank and station he had held in society, it seems perfectly astonishing, in this biographic age, that so few particulars of his personal history should have been handed down to us; that even the date and place of his birth should have no positive record." Well does this writer call the present a biographic age. Memoirs are now written of almost everybody, either by others |