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Verge of the Tomb these Verses "Si rogitas'" (etc. see above). "On the Inside of the Tomb was his Arms, now gone, but the same are painted over it under the Arch of the Church Wall."

The full-page engraving which accompanies the text shows the epitaph as cited above, four lines of Latin, the date, a single line of Latin, and the line giving Brigham's name; below this appears the date 1556. A shield of the arms is on each side of the epitaph, and in each of the sculptured quatrefoils on the front of the tomb; the epitaph is above the tomb itself, under the canopy, upon the wall at the back of the recess.

In Neale and Brayley's History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St. Peter, Westminster, London 1818-1823, II : 265, occurs the passage cited by Sir Harris Nicolas in his Life of Chaucer, upon Chaucer's tomb and epitaph. Neale and Brayley say: "In front of the Tomb are three pannelled divisions of starred quatrefoils, containing sculptured shields, on which the arms of Chaucer are alone distinguishable, through the partial decomposition and crumbling state of the marble: the same arms may be traced in an oblong compartment at the back of the recess, where also, are some remains of the following Inscription, now almost obliterated from similar circumstances"; (the epitaph is then given as by Camden above cited, but with v everywhere written for u, and the date 1550 below the line containing Brigham's name). It is then added that the whole of the recess and the canopy have recently been colored black.

In the Nineteenth Century for August, 1897, p. 336, Henry Troutbeck, coroner for Westminster, states that he examined Chaucer's bones when they were exposed in the digging of Browning's grave, and that from the measurements which he made of some of the larger bones, he judges the poet to have been about five feet six inches tall.

d) Connection with Thomas Chaucer, etc.

The filiation of Thomas Chaucer, a wealthy landowner and conspicuous political figure of the fifteenth century, to Geoffrey Chaucer, was first asserted by Thomas Gascoigne, died 1458, in his Dictionarium Theologicum, which is in MS in the library of Lincoln College, Oxford, and is not yet printed as a whole, though extracts were published by Thorold Rogers as Loci e Libro Veritatum, Oxford, 1881. The passage on Thomas Chaucer, not printed by Rogers, was quoted by Hales, Athen. 1888 I: 404, reprinted Folia Litteraria 1893 pp. 110-111. Skeat, I:1, quotes a sentence; and see Chalmers' English Poets, I, page x. In the life of Chaucer prefixed to the Speght of 1598, see ante, Thomas appears as Geoffrey's son in the stemma drawn up by the antiquary Glover. The remark

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follows, by Speght or Stow, that "some hold opinion (but I know not upon what grounds) that Thomas Chaucer was rather some Kinsman" whom Geoffrey Chaucer brought up. The LifeRecords, part IV, pp. 51-57, discuss the question at length, and take up the theory mentioned by Speght or Stow; suggestion is even made as to the real name of him who was called Thomas Chaucer. A work upon the subject is announced by the Chaucer Society.

Furnivall published in Notes and Queries, 1872 I: 381 ff., a poem by Lydgate addressed to Thomas Chaucer on the occasion of his departure to France upon ambassade, in which no mention is made of any relation between Thomas and Geoffrey; the same text is printed in Mod. Phil. I : 331-5. Furnivall regards this as strong proof against the filiation, since Lydgate's admiration for the elder Chaucer would certainly lead him to mention the connection if any existed. Kittredge, Nan 1894 II: 309, considers this inference unnecessary, as Lydgate was writing a mere occasional poem. In Acad. 1901 II: 597 Furnivall repeats his argument, opposing a letter printed ibid. p. 572.

Minor notes are in N. and Q. 1872 I : 436, 468, 493, II : 15; 1884 I:364; 1891 II: 47, 109, 215, 338; 1900 I: 146 and refs. there given; Acad. 1874 I:65, 94; Athen. 1888 I : 404, 436, 468.

Koch, Chronology, pp. 18-20, opposes filiation.

In the Bell Chaucer of 1854, vol. VIII p. 130, is a note on Thomas Chaucer, as follows: "In searching the Bodleian Library for MSS for this edition, a curious fact was discovered, which, though possibly known to Tyrwhitt, has not been mentioned by him or any subsequent editor. In the volume marked Fairfax 16 are contained, in addition to The Compleynte of Mars and Venus, and other poems, by Geoffrey Chaucer, some short pieces by one Thomas Chaucer. This person was probably the poet's eldest son or a kinsman, who, according to a tradition prevalent in Speght's time, was educated by his more celebrated relative. To this Thomas Chaucer, therefore, might very probably be traced many of those short pieces published by Speght, but properly rejected from later editions of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer."

Bell is here in error. The MS Fairfax 16 contains no pieces marked as by Thomas Chaucer, but in another Bodleian MS, the Shirley codex Ashmole 59, the envoy of the Venus is marked in the margin as by Thomas Chaucer, see Anglia 30:326-7.

In the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. LI, there is printed, to face p. 389, a genealogical tree of the Manning family, from which it appears that one Simon Manning de Codham, Kent, who was living in the 46th year of Edward III and the fifth of Richard II, married "Catharina soror Galfridi Chawcer

militis celeberrimi Poetae Anglicani." From this union several well known New England families, among them the Higginsons and Prescotts, claim descent. Henry F. Waters, the compiler of the notes to this tree, see ibid. PP. 403, 405 in especial, assigns MS Harley 1548 as the source of his information, which reference is correct. The Harleian Catalogue says that this MS was written and tricked by Richard Mundy, and that the copy of the Visitation Book of the County of Kent which it contains, whence this genealogy is taken, is from that made and taken in 1619, 1620, 1621 by John Philpot Rouge Dragon, for William Camden Clarencieux. A note by the cataloguer says: "Herein I find many enlargements by Mr. Mundy and by Mr. Robert Dale; but mostly by the former.”

C. Portraits of Chaucer

The Chaucer Society published in their second series, 1900, "The Portraits of Geoffrey Chaucer", by M. H. Spielmann; this work was reviewed by Koch, Engl. Stud. 30: 445-50.

Spielmann attaches by far the greatest value to the halflength executed by order of Hoccleve on the margin of leaf 91 in MS. Harley 4866. This he reproduces; reproductions are also to be found e. g. in Life Records, part II frontispiece, Skeat I, frontispiece, Garnett and Gosse's Engl. Lit. vol. I, to face p. 140. There is a description in Trial Forew. pp. 93-4, and one by Lowell in his essay on Chaucer, in My Study Windows.

Chaucer is depicted, from fancy, by painters of the Canterbury Pilgrimage, see under Pictures of the Pilgrims at the close of Section III here. A bust by George Frampton, R. A., exhibited in the Royal Academy, 1903, has been placed in the Guildhall, London.

Previous partial lists of Chaucer's portraits are in the Dict. Nat. Biog., art. Chaucer. Many allusions to portraits, usually of no authenticity, may be found in the columns of Notes and Queries.

D. Chaucer as a Character in Fiction

Chaucer appears as a character in Robert Greene's Vision (about 1590?); in Ben Jonson's masque of The Golden Age Restored (1615), in the first recension of Gay's Wife of Bath (see p. 298 here), in E. L. Blanchard's Friar Bacon (1863), in à Beckett and Stanfield's operetta of The Canterbury Pilgrims (1884), and in Percy Mackaye's Canterbury Pilgrims (1903). See also James White's Adventures of John of Gaunt, Dublin (1790), 2 vols., described Anglia 25:251; and Florence Converse's novel entitled Long Will, Boston, 1903.

Landor's Imaginary Conversations include one between Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Petrarch.

I

SECTION II

THE WORKS OF CHAUCER

A. Introduction: On the Canon of Chaucer

N studying the work of a nineteenth-century poet, we have at our command a text which has been prepared for the press by the author himself or by his literary executor, so that we are secure of our data when discussing the poet's vocabulary or versepeculiarities. If in various successive editions the author introduces changes, as was true of Rossetti and Wordsworth and Tennyson, we have all those dated editions at our disposal, and an essay like Dowden's on the text of Wordsworth's poems becomes possible. But Early English verse offers us few or no such certainties. There is a sense in which it is true that we do not know what Chaucer wrote.

The works of Chaucer, written before the era of printing, have come down to us in a mass of manuscripts, mainly of the century following his death. No one of these texts appears to be in the poet's own handwriting, and notwithstanding the great amount of penwork which Chaucer's position in the Customs required of him, no written line or even signature by him has yet been discovered. (See Life Records pt. IV, pp. xxiv, 233 note, 278 note. See query in Athen. 1868 II: 370.) Further, there appears in Chaucer's case scarcely any evidence of personal effort towards an accurate reproduction of his own works, such as Macaulay has pointed out to be true of Gower; see Works of John Gower, II: clxvii. The only bits of such evidence for Chaucer are the stanza of reproof to Adam his scrivener, and the lines at the close of the Troilus, fearing its too probable "mysmetring". Our text of the poems has to be obtained from the uncorrected copies of fifteenth-century scribes made at second or third hand or even further from the original. Francis Thynne, in his Animadversions, tells of a manuscript of Chaucer, known to his father, which bore the endorsement "Examinatur Chaucer"; but, as Furnivall says, this more than invaluable manuscript has never been seen by any student. We not only have no

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