In the chronology of our poetical collectors, GOWER takes precedence of CHAUCER unjustly, for Chaucer had composed many of his works in the only language which he has written before the elder claimed the honours of an English vernacular poet, and, probably, then only emulating the success of him who first set the glorious example. Nor less in the rank of poetry must Chaucer hold the precedence. The first true English poet is Chaucer; and notwithstanding that the rhythmical cadences of his unequal metre are now lost for us, Chaucer is the first modeller of the heroic couplet and other varieties of English versification. By the felicity of his poetic character, Chaucer was not only the parent, but the master, of those two schools of poetry which still divide its votaries by an idle rivalry, and which have been traced, like our architecture, the one to a Gothic origin, and the other to a classical model.
The personal history of CHAUCER, poetical and political, might have been susceptible of considerable development had the poet himself written it, for his biographers had no life to record. Speght, one of the early editors, in the good method of that day, having set down a variety of heads, including all that we might wish to know of any man, when this methodiser of commonplaces came to fill up these well-planned divisions concerning Chaucer, he could only disprove what was accepted, and supply only what is uncertain. The "Life of Chaucer" by Godwin is a theoretical life, and, as much as relates to Chaucer himself, a single fatal fact, when all was finished, dispersed the baseless vision.[1] The whole rested on the unauthenticated and contradictory statements of Leland, who, writing a century after the times of Chaucer, hastily collected unsubstantial traditions, and, what was less pardonable in Leland, fell into some anachronisms.
This defective chronology in the life of the poet has involved the more important subject of the chronology of his works. Posterity may be little concerned in the dates of his birth and his burial--his unknown parentage--his descriptive name--and, above all, his suspicious shield, which the heralds opined must have been blazoned out of the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth propositions of the first book of Euclid, from the poet's love of geometry, or, more obviously, from having no coat-of-arms to show of "far more ancient antiquity." But posterity would have been interested in the history of the genius of Chaucer, who having long paced in a lengthened circuit of verbal version and servile imitation, passed through some remarkable transitions, kindling the cold ashes of translation into the fire of invention; from cloudy allegory breaking forth into the sunshine of the loveliest landscape-painting; and from the amatory romance gliding into that vein of humour and satire which in his old age poured forth a new creation. All this he might himself have told, or Gower might have revealed, had the elder bard who lauded the lays and "ditties" of the youth of "the Clerk of Venus" loved him as well in his old age. But elegant literature, as distinguished from scholastic, was then without price or reward. The few men of genius who have written at this early period are only known to us by their writings, and probably were more known to their contemporaries by the station which they may have occupied, than by that which they maintain with posterity.