but it is impossible to say whether this is autobiographical or not. The two poets may well have met, but in this, as in so many other cases, we cannot be certain. It is improbable that he ever met Boccaccio, since, largely as he borrows from the _Filostrato_ and the _Teseide_, he never once mentions Boccaccio's name, and when, in _Troilus and Criseyde_, he confesses that he is indebted to an earlier poet for his story, he gives him the apparently fictitious name of Lollius. Mr. Coulton suggests that Boccaccio's works may have been published anonymously and that Chaucer may have been ignorant of their real author, and this could hardly have been the case if the two had met. But whether Chaucer had, or had not, any personal intercourse with Petrarch and Boccaccio, both their work and Dante's exercised marked influence upon him. More of this will be said in the next chapter; here it is sufficient to note that the Italian mission affected not only his material prosperity but also his literary development. Meanwhile he continued to grow in favour at court. On St. George's Day, 1374, he was granted a daily pitcher of wine from the royal cellars--later commuted for a payment in money. In the following May he rented the gate-house of Aldgate from the corporation of London. A month later he was appointed controller of customs for wool, etc., in the port of London, receiving a few days afterwards an additional pension of £10 a year from John of Gaunt and his wife. Office work seems to have weighed heavily on the poet, and there may well be truth in the complaint of the _Hous of Fame_ (Bk. II, l. 644, etc.) that it cut him off from all intercourse with the world:-- ... thou hast no tydinges Of Loves folk, if they be glade, Ne of noght elles that god made; And noght only fro fer contree That ther no tyding comth to thee, But of thy verray neyghebores, That dwellen almost at thy dores, Thou herest neither that ne this; For whan thy labour doon al is, And hast y-maad thy rekeninges, In stede of reste and newe thinges, Thou gost hoom to thy hous anoon; And, also domb as any stoon, Thou sittest at another boke, Til fully daswed is thy loke,[17] And livest thus as an hermyte Although thyn abstinence is lyte. In November 1375 Chaucer was granted the wardship of Edmund Staplegate of Kent. Few persons nowadays would welcome such a charge, but in the fourteenth century the position of guardian was highly coveted, and not infrequently bought for a good round sum, since the holder had a right to a certain percentage (sometimes amounting to as much as 10%) of the ward's property, to say nothing of the power of selling him (or her) in marriage. This particular wardship brought in £103.