It was an age of talk: "mirth is none," says Chaucer's host, "to ride on by the way dumb as a stone "; and the Trouveur aimed simply at being the most agreeable talker of his day.

His romances, his rimes of Sir Tristram, his Romance of the Rose, are full of colour and fantasy, endless in detail, but with a sort of gorgeous idleness about their very length, the minuteness of their description of outer things, the vagueness of their touch when it passes to the subtler inner world.
It was with this literature that Chaucer had till now been familiar, and it was this which he followed in his earlier work.

But from the time of his visits to Milan and Genoa his sympathies drew him not to the dying verse of France but to the new and mighty upgrowth of poetry in Italy.

Dante's eagle looks at him from the sun.

"Fraunces Petrark, the laureat poete," is to him one "whose rethorique sweete enlumyned al Itail of poetrie." The "Troilus" which he produced about 1382 is an enlarged English version of Boccaccio's "Filostrato"; the Knight's Tale, whose first draft is of the same period, bears slight traces of his Teseide.