Chaucer was our first great master of laughter and of tears. His serious
poetry is full of the tenderest pathos. His loosest tales are
delightfully humorous and life-like. He is the kindliest of satirists.
The knavery, greed, and hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers
of indulgences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by Langland and
Wiclif, though his mood is not, like theirs, one of stern, moral
indignation, but rather the good-natured scorn of a man of the world.
His charity is broad enough to cover even the corrupt sompnour, of whom
he says,
And yet in sooth he was a good felawe.
Whether he shared Wiclif's opinions is unknown, but John of Gaunt, the
Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV., who was Chaucer's life-long
patron, was likewise Wiclif's great upholder against the persecution of
the bishops. It is, perhaps, not without significance that the poor
parson in the _Canterbury Tales_, the only one of his ecclesiastical
pilgrims whom Chaucer treats with respect, is suspected by the host of
the Tabard to be a "loller," that is, a Lollard, or disciple of Wiclif,
and that, because he objects to the jovial innkeeper's swearing "by
Goddes bones."
Chaucer's English is nearly as easy for a modern reader as Shakspere's,
and few of his words have become obsolete.
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