It is asserted by writers not incautious, that Gower and Chaucer were laureates; and we are unwilling to doubt it, though the authority is far from conclusive. Chaucer, born about 1328, the second year of Edward the Third's reign, died in 1400. It is certain that he was liberally patronised, and gratified with lucrative appointments by Edward. It is recorded, too, that he was employed on foreign missions of trust; that on one occasion he was an envoy to Genoa, and that he then visited Petrarch at Padua; and as the arguments for and against the probability of this interview are pretty nearly balanced, we are not bound to deny ourselves the pleasure of believing it. Froissart, as well as Hollinshed and Barnes, bears testimony to Chaucer's having been one of a mission to the court of France, in the last year of Edward's reign; but it is not clear, nor even at all deducible from the nature of the public employments, and the character of Edward, that it was his poetical merit which promoted him to the royal confidence in matters of business.
Gower, born, it is supposed, somewhat earlier than Chaucer, died two years later, in 1402, and had been blind for the last two or three years of his life. Bale makes Gower _equitem auratum et poetam laureatum_; but Winstansley says he was neither laureated nor hederated, but only rosated, having a chaplet of four roses about his head on his monumental stone in St Mary Overy's Church, Southwark. His "_Confessio Amantis_" is said to have been prompted by the command of Richard the Second, who, chancing to meet him on the Thames, invited him into his gilded barge,--
"While proudly riding o'er the azure realm, Youth at the prow, and pleasure at the helm,"
enjoined him to "book something new." In the three next reigns of the line of Lancaster, Henry the Fourth, Henry the Fifth, and Henry the Sixth, a period of sixty-two years, we hardly know what became of the court poets, or whether there were any. Musicians were liberally privileged as palace servants by Henry the Fourth, but his reign was unfavourable to the minstrel art. Henry the Fifth was partial to minstrelsy, and rewarded it generously; but we find no report of a laureat poet. In Henry the Sixth's time, boys were pressed into the minstrel service of the court; but it is not recorded that any one was made a poet by virtue of royal kidnapping. They were instructed in music for the solace of his majesty.