VOL.  I.

MDCCLIII.

Volume I.

Contains the

LIVES

O F

Chaucer
Langland
Gower
Lydgate
Harding
Skelton
Barclay
More
Surry Earl
Wyat
Sackville
Churchyard
Heywood
Ferrars
Sidney
Marloe
Green
Spenser
Heywood
Lilly
Overbury
Marsten
Shakespear
Sylvester
Daniel
Harrington
Decker
Beaumont and Fletcher
Lodge
Davies
Goff
Greville L. Brooke
Day
Raleigh
Donne
Drayton
Corbet
Fairfax
Randolph
Chapman
Johnson
Carew
Wotton
Markham
T. Heywood
Cartwright
Sandys
Falkland
Suckling
Hausted
Drummond
Stirling Earl
Hall
Crashaw
Rowley
Nash
Ford
Middleton

THE LIVES OF THE POETS.

* * * *

GEOFFRY CHAUCER.

It has been observed that men of eminence in all ages, and distinguished for the same excellence, have generally had something in their lives similar to each other.  The place of Homer’s nativity, has not been more variously conjectured, or his parents more differently assigned than our author’s.  Leland, who lived nearest to Chaucer’s time of all those who have wrote his life, was commissioned by king Henry VIII, to search all the libraries, and religious houses in England, when those archives were preserved, before their destruction was produced by the reformation, or Polydore Virgil had consumed such curious pieces as would have contradicted his framed and fabulous history.  He for some reasons believed Oxford or Berkshire to have given birth to this great man, but has not informed us what those reasons were that induced him to believe so, and at present there appears no other, but that the seats of his family were in those countries.  Pitts positively asserts, without producing any authority to support it, that Woodstock was the place; which opinion Mr. Camden seems to hint at, where he mentions that town; but it may be suspected that Pitts had no other ground for the assertion, than Chaucer’s mentioning Woodstock park in his works, and having a house there.  But after all these different pretensions, he himself, in the Testament of Love, seems to point out the place of his nativity to be the city of London, and tho’ Mr. Camden mentions the claim of Woodstock, he does not give much credit to it; for speaking of Spencer (who was uncontrovertedly born in London) he calls him fellow citizen to Chaucer.