We have better data and surer ground to go upon when we come to score his official relations. We know that when not very far advanced in age (about 1370) he went to the continent on the King’s service; accomplishing it so well--presumably--that he is sent again, very shortly after, with a commission--his journey calling him to Genoa and Florence; Italy and the Mediterranean, then, probably for the first time, with all their glamour of old story, coming to his view. Some biographers make out, from chance lines in his after-poems, that he went over to Padua and saw Petrarch there, and learned of him some stories, which he afterward wrought into his garland of the Canterbury Tales. Possibly;[45] but it was not an easy journey over the mountains to Padua in those days, even if Petrarch had been domiciled there,--which is very doubtful; for the Italian poet, old and feeble, passed most of the latter years of his life at Arqua among the Euganean hills; and if Chaucer had met him, Petrarch would have been more apt to ask the man from far-away, murky England, about his country and King and the Prince Lionel (dead in those days), who only a few years before had married, at Milan, a daughter of the Visconti--than to bore him with a story at second hand (from Boccaccio) about the patient Griselda. However this may be, it is agreed by nearly all commentators, that by reason of his southward journeyings and his after-familiarity with Italian literature (if indeed this familiarity were not of earlier date), that his own poetic outlook became greatly widened, and he fell away, in large degree, from his old imitative allegiance to the jingling measures of France, and that pretty “Maze of to and fro, Where light-heeled numbers laugh and go.” Through all this time he is in receipt of favors from the Government--sometimes in the shape of direct pension--sometimes of an annual gift of wine--sometimes in moneys for payment of his costs of travel;--sometime, too, he has a money-getting place in the Customs.