Page:Stories from Old English Poetry-1899.djvu/19



OU have heard of Dr. Samuel Johnson, have you not? He who made a great English dictionary, who was famous for saying wise things, and was in his way a very great man. One of his sayings was, that a poet ought to know everything and to have seen everything. And this seems to be proved true by the fact that most of the really wonderful poets have been men of very wide experience in life, or else they observed so closely and were gifted with such clear insight, that all things of which they wrote were as real to them as if they were a part of them.

So Shakespeare has been thought to be a school-teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, a soldier, as well as an actor and manager of a theatre. And Chaucer, about whom I wish to tell you, has been thought just such another Jack-at-all-trades.

Geoffrey Chaucer, who is called the &ldquo;Father