, spoke French as their vernacular tongue, while English had only
been the mixed, corrupted language of the lower classes, which was now
brought thus by king and poet into honorable consideration.
HIS DEATH.--Chaucer died on the 25th of October, 1400, in his little
tenement in the garden of St. Mary's Chapel, Westminster, and left his
works and his fame to an evil and unappreciative age. His monument was not
erected until one hundred and fifty-six years afterward, by Nicholas
Brigham. It stands in the "poets' corner" of Westminster Abbey, and has
been the nucleus of that gathering-place of the sacred dust which once
enclosed the great minds of England. The inscription, which justly styles
him "Anglorum vates ter maximus," is not to be entirely depended upon as
to the "annus Domini," or "tempora vitae," because of the turbulent and
destructive reigns that had intervened--evil times for literary effort,
and yet making material for literature and history, and producing that
wonderful magician, the printing-press, and paper, by means of which the
former things might be disseminated, and Chaucer brought nearer to us than
to them.
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