linguistic:paraphrasing, structural:expansion, information:classification, structural:scholar_edition
Early criticism

"The language of England, upon which Chaucer was the first to confer celebrity, has amply justified the foresight which led him to disdain all others for its sake, and, in turn, has conferred an enduring celebrity upon him who trusted his reputation to it without reserve."

—T. R. Lounsbury.

The poet Thomas Hoccleve, who may have met Chaucer and considered him his role model, hailed Chaucer as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage". John Lydgate referred to Chaucer within his own text The Fall of Princes as the "lodesterre (guiding principle) … off our language". Around two centuries later, Sir Philip Sidney greatly praised Troilus and Criseyde in his own Defence of Poesie. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Chaucer came to be viewed as a symbol of the nation's poetic heritage.

In Charles Dickens ' 1850 novel David Copperfield, the Victorian era author echoed Chaucer's use of Luke 23:34 from Troilus and Criseyde (Dickens held a copy in his library among other works of Chaucer), with G. K. Chesterton writing, "among the great canonical English authors, Chaucer and Dickens have the most in common."