But Chaucer was the ideal book-lover: knowing Dante, Boccaccio, and in some degree “Franceys Petrark, the laureat poete,” who “enlumined al Itaille of poetry,” Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, Ovid--his favourite author--and Boëthius; as well as Guido delle Colonne’s prose epic of the story of Troy, the poems of Guillaume de Machaut, the _Roman de la Rose_, and a work on the astrolabe by Messahala.[454] We have some excellent pictures of Chaucer’s habit of reading. When his day’s work is done he goes home and buries himself with his books--
“Domb as any stoon, Thou sittest at another boke, Til fully daswed is thy loke.”[455]
In the _Parliament of Fowls_ he tells us that he read books often for instruction and pleasure, and the coming on of night alone would force him to put away his book. He would not have been a true reader had he not developed the habit of reading in bed.
“...Whan I saw I might not slepe, Til now late, this other night, Upon my bedde I sat upright And bad oon reche me a book, A romance, and he hit me took To rede and dryve the night away;
And in this boke were writen fables That clerkes hadde, in olde tyme, And other poets, put in ryme....”[456]
So he found solace and delight, as countless thousands have done, in his Ovid. The world of books and of reading is apt to seem stuffy, the favoured home of the moody spirit, a lair to which a dirty and ragged Magliabechi retreats, a palace where a Beckford gloats solitary over his treasures--a world whence we often desire to escape, since we know we can return to it when we will. For if good books shelter us from the realities of life, life itself refreshes the student like cool rain upon the fevered brow. Chaucer was the bright spirit who let his books fill their proper place in his life. In books, he says--
“I me delyte, And to hem give I feyth and ful credence, And in myn heart have hem in reverence So hertely that ther is game noon That fro my bokes maketh me to goon.”
Yet books are something much less than life: there is the open air,--the meadows bright with flowers,--the melody of birds,--
“...Whan that the month of May Is comen, and that I hear the foules singe, And that the flowers ’ginnen for to spring Farwel my book....”[457]