Distinguished Men of Modern Times Volume 1 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: interval of hesitation, this disgraceful edict was obeyed. Thirty years from his death his grave was violated, and his ashes contemptuously cast into a neighbouring brook. On this indignity Ful- ler makes the following memorable reflection: " The brook did convey his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow seas; they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wic- lif are the emblems of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over." CHAUCER. There is considerable discrepance between the generally received and the probable date of Geoffrey Chaucer's birth. In the life prefixed to the edition of his works by Speght, it is stated that he " departed out of this world in the year of our Lord 1400, after he had lived about seventy years." The biographer's authority for this is " Bale, out of Leland." Leland's accuracy on this, as on many other points, may, however, be doubted, since he believed that Oxfordshire or Berkshire was the poet's native county, whereas Chaucer himself, in his Testament of Love, mentions London as the " place of his kindly engendure." The received date of his birth is 1328; and if that be correct, he was fifty-eight in 1386. But a record in the Appendix to Mr. Godwin's Life shows that in that same year he was a witness on oath, in a question between Sir Richard le Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor. The point at issue occasioned an inquiry to be made as to Chaucer's age, which he then stated to be " forty years and upward." Eighteen years upon forty would be rather a large upward, on a sworn examination. Mr. Sharon Turner, therefore, in his History of the Middle Ages, suggests, with every appearance of reason, that 1340, or thereabout, is a date fairly corresponding with the witness's " forty years and upward," and even necess...