Still it is pleasant to find that Henry of Lancaster shared his father’s friendship for Chaucer. I dare say he had been rocked on Chaucer’s knee when a little child, and had played with Chaucer’s children. He came back from France, after John of Gaunt’s death, and the people made him King, and sent King Richard to the castle of Pomfret (where I am sorry to say he was afterwards murdered). The new King had not been on the throne four days before he helped Chaucer. John of Gaunt himself could not have done it quicker. He granted him an annuity of £26 13_s._ 4_d._ a year, in addition to the other £20 granted by Richard. The royal bounty was only just in time, for poor old Chaucer did not long survive his old friend, the Duke of Lancaster. He died about a year after him, when Henry had been King thirteen months. John of Gaunt was buried in St. Paul’s, by the side of his first and best-loved wife, Blanche; Geoffrey Chaucer was buried in Westminster Abbey. So ended the first, and almost the greatest, English writer, of whom no one has spoken an ill word, and who himself spoke no ill words. Poet, soldier, statesman, and scholar, ‘truly his better ne his pere, in school of my rules could I never find.... In goodness of gentle, manly speech he passeth all other makers.’[24] XII. And now for Chaucer’s ‘speech.’ How shall I show you its ‘goodness,’ since it is so difficult to read this old English? Wait a bit. You will soon understand it all, if you take pains at the first beginning. Do not be afraid of the funny spelling, for you must remember that it is not so much that Chaucer spells differently from us, as that we have begun to spell differently from Chaucer. He would think our English quite as funny, and not half so pretty as his own; for the old English, when spoken, sounded very pretty and stately, and not so much like a ‘gabble’ as ours. I told you a little while ago, you know, that our talking is much faster than talking was in Chaucer’s time; it seems very curious that a language can be so changed in a few hundred years, without people really meaning to change it. But it has changed gradually. Little by little new words have come into use, and others have got ‘old-fashioned.’ Even the English of _one_ hundred years ago was very unlike our own. But the English of _five_ hundred years ago was, of course, still more unlike. XIII. Now, I have put, as I told you, two versions of Chaucer’s poetry on the page, side by side. First, the lines as Chaucer made them, and then the same lines in English such as we speak. You can thus look at both, and compare them.