xxviii. 74, 81; and see Chaucer's reference to 'Barnabo Viscounte' in the

Monkes Tale, B 3589.

375. _Reward at_, regard to. _Reward_ and _regard_ are etymologically identical. Observe the accent on the _former_ syllable. Cf. l. 399.

378. _Fermour_, a farmer of taxes; who is naturally exacting and oppressive.

380. Before _is_ supply _hit_, which, as in l. 379, refers to a suppliant culprit. His own vassals are a lord's treasures, to be cherished, not oppressed.

381. Bech refers us to Seneca, De Clementia, lib. i. c. 3, § 3; c. 5, § 4. Or perhaps Aristotle is meant, whose supposed advice to Alexander is fully given in Gower's Confessio Amantis, bk. vii. See particularly the passage in Pauli's edition, iii. 176:--

'What is a king in his legeaunce, Wher that ther is no law in londe?'

There is a similar long and tedious passage in Lancelot of the Laik, ed. Skeat, ll. 1463-1998. Gower calls Aristotle 'the philosophre'; C. A. iii. 86. We may also compare Hoccleve, De Regimine Principum, ed. Wright, pp. 102-3, translated from Ægidius, De Reg. Princ., lib. i. pars 1, cap. xiv; where the reference to Aristotle is:--'Propter quod V. Ethicorum scribitur, quod _principatus uirum ostendit_.'

384. _Al_, although. 'Although he will preserve their rank for his lords.' Note that _his lordes_ is in the dative case. It was probably from not observing this that Thynne's edition and the Pepys MS. have needlessly inserted the word _in_ before _hir_. Cf. A. 370.

387. _Half-goddes_, demi-gods. Cf. 'the demi-god Authority'; Meas. for Meas. i. 2. 124.

391. So, in his Epitaph on Inigo Jones, Ben Jonson says:--'The Libyan lion hunts no butterflies'; which he took from Martial, Epig. xii. 61. 6. And see Pliny, Nat. Hist. viii. 16.

397. _Areste._ Bell seems to suggest the sense of 'restraint,' and Prof. Corson, following him, suggests 'self-command'; but such a sense does not exactly appear in Murray's Dictionary. Nevertheless, 'self-restraint' suits not only this passage, but also the passage cited from the Harleian MS. in the foot-note to the Somnour's Tale, D 2048, in vol. iv. p. 381.

399. Here, as in l. 375, _reward_ means 'regard,' and is accented on the _e_.

400. _Maystrie_, masterly act; _no maystrie_, an easy matter.

405. This is not altogether a metaphorical expression. We remember something very like it at the siege of Calais in 1347, when, according to Froissart, Edward III. sent for the six inhabitants of Calais, who were to present themselves 'with bare heads and feet, with ropes round their necks'; see Froissart, tr. by Johnes, bk. i. c. 145.

415. In the earlier text (A 403), the word _He_ stands alone in the first foot, which is less pleasing.

417. See Introd. to the Minor Poems (in vol. i.) for a discussion of some of the poems here mentioned. He here mentions, first of all, three of his lesser poems, in the order of their length; viz. the Hous of Fame, the Deeth of Blaunche, and the Parlement of Foules.

420. The 'Palamoun and Arcyte' here referred to was no doubt a translation of Boccaccio's Teseide, or of selections from it, in seven-line stanzas. Though not preserved to us in its entirety, several fragments of it remain. These are to be found (1) in sixteen stanzas of the Parl. of Foules (ll. 183-294), translated from the Teseide, bk. vii. st. 51-66; (2) in part of the first ten stanzas of Anelida, from the same, bk. i. st. 1-3, and bk. ii. st. 10-12; (3) in three stanzas near the end of Troilus (viz. st. 7, 8, and 9 from the end), from the same, xi. 1-3; and (4) in a re-written form, in what is now known as the Knightes Tale. See Notes to Anelida, in vol. i. pp. 529, 530.

421. 'Though the story is little known.' Tyrwhitt remarks that these words 'seem to imply that it [Chaucer's original version of Palamon and Arcite] had not made itself very popular.' Unfortunately, Tyrwhitt, who so very seldom goes astray, has here misled nearly all who have consulted him. Chaucer is not referring to his own version of the story, nor even to Boccaccio's version, but to the old story _itself_; and he is merely repeating Boccaccio's own remark, when (in the Teseide, i. 2) he speaks of it as

'--una storia antica, Tanto negli anni riposta e nascosa, Che Latino autor non par ne dica, Per quel ch'io senta, in libro alcuna cosa.'

And, in truth, the story must have been known but to very few, till Boccaccio rescued it from oblivion. This is all that is meant; and there is no difficulty. Note further that Chaucer refers to the very same passage in another poem; see note to Anelida, l. 8.

423. A Balade is, properly, a poem in three stanzas, in which each stanza ends with the same line, called the refrain. There is also usually a fourth stanza, called _Lenvoy_, or the Envoy, which is sometimes shorter than the other three. Most of Chaucer's Balades have probably perished, as only a few are now known. These are: _Fortune_, consisting of 3 Balades, each in 8-line stanzas, followed by a single Envoy; _Truth_, a Balade with Envoy, in 7-line stanzas; _Gentilesse_, without Envoy; _Lak of Stedfastnesse_, with Envoy; (probably) _A Balade against women unconstaunt_, without Envoy; _The Complaint of Venus_, consisting of 3 Balades, with a general Envoy; _The Compleint to his Purse_, with Envoy of five lines only; _To Rosemounde_, without Envoy; and the Balade included in the present poem, at ll. 249-269 above.

A _Roundel_ is a poem of from nine to fourteen lines, in which only eight lines are different from each other, the rest being repetitions of lines that have already occurred. See this fully explained in the note to l. 675 of the Parl. of Foules. The one certain example is the Roundel included in the Parl. of Foules, beginning at l. 680. There is also a beautiful example of a Triple Roundel, which I have included in the Minor Poems, with the title of Merciless Beauty. No doubt Chaucer wrote many more, but they are lost.

A _Virelay_ is a poem in an unusual metre, of which examples are very rare. Only one entire poem of this character has been conjecturally assigned to Chaucer, but it is written in later English, and cannot possibly be his. It is not a true Virelay (in the French sense), and first appeared in the edition of 1561; see vol. i. p. 33. In this poem, lines 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 all rime together; and l. 4 rimes with l. 8. Then comes the 'veer' or 'turn,' which requires that, in the next stanza, lines 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15 shall rime with lines 4 and 8, as, in fact, they do; but lines 12 and 16 introduce a _new_ rime, as they should _not_ do. We find, however, two fair examples of the Virelay in the poem of Anelida, viz. in lines 256-271 and 317-332. In the former of these, the rime in _-ee_ (_-e_) appears in lines 256-8 and 260-2, and the rime in _-yte_ ends lines 259 and 263; whereas, conversely, the rime in _-yte_ ends lines 264-6 and 268-270, whilst lines 267 and 271 repeat the rime in _-ee_. Similarly, ll. 317-332 exhibit veering rimes in _-eye_ and _-ure_.

In Hoccleve's Poems, ed. Furnivall (Early Eng. Text Soc., Extra Series, 1892), there are several clever and intricate examples of the Virelay. Thus, in Balade IV, at p. 39, there are five stanzas, but only three rimes, viz. in _-al_, _-ee_, and _-ay_. The formula of rimes, for the first and third stanzas, is _a b a b b c b c_; for the second and fourth stanzas, _c b c b b a b a_; and for the fifth stanza, _a c a c c b c b_. See also the same, pp. 41, 47, 49, 58, 59, 61, 62. Beyond all doubt, Hoccleve copied the forms of Chaucer's lost virelays.

424. _Holynesse_, holy employment, religious composition. This is, clearly, an intentional substitution for the _besinesse_, i.e. 'laborious employment,' in the A-text, l. 412.

425. Chaucer made an excellent prose translation of Boethius de Consolatione Philosophiæ, a Latin treatise much admired in the middle ages, and still worthy of admiration. For further remarks, see vol. iii.

--A. 414. This is the only notice we possess of a work by Chaucer which is no longer extant. We gather from it that he made a translation of the Latin prose treatise by Pope Innocent III., entitled De Miseria Conditionis Humanæ, a gloomy enumeration of human woes without a single alleviating touch of hope, fiercely and unrelentingly set forth. It is probable that it was written in 7-line stanzas; for portions of it appear to be preserved in the Prologue to the Man of Lawes Tale, B 99-126, and in other stanzas of the same (B 421-7, 771-7, 925-931, 1135-8).

426. _The Lyf of Seynt Cecyle_ is happily preserved. It was one of Chaucer's early productions; but he himself rescued it from possible disappearance by introducing it into the Canterbury Tales, with the title of the Second Nonnes Tale.

428. This is another of the lost works. We gather that he made a translation from a piece attributed to Origen, one of the most eminent of the early Christian writers, who was born at Alexandria in 186. Tyrwhitt says the piece meant is doubtless 'the Homily _de Maria Magdalena_, which has been commonly, though falsely, attributed to Origen; see Opp. Origenis, Tom. ii. p. 291, ed. Paris, 1604.' Tyrwhitt adds, very justly and incontrovertibly--'I cannot believe that the Poem entitled The Lamentation of Marie Magdaleine, which is in all the [older] editions of Chaucer, is really that work of his. It can hardly be considered as a translation, or even as an imitation, of the Homily; and the composition, in every respect, is infinitely meaner than the worst of his genuine pieces.'

432. Here, in the B-text, the name of Alcestis is first mentioned; yet strange to say, Chaucer does not realise who she is till later; see l. 518. She was the wife of Admetus, not king of Thrace (as here said) but of Pheræ in Thessaly. Apollo obtained from the Moiræ a promise to grant Admetus deliverance from death if, at the hour of his death, his father, mother, or wife, would consent to die for him. Alcestis consented to die in his stead, and is therefore here taken as the chief type of wifely devotion. The mention of Alcestis in the Court of Love, st. 15, is merely copied from Chaucer; so also Lydgate's use of _Alceste_ to mean 'a daisy,' in his Legend of St. Edmund, l. 235 of the additional stanzas found in MS. Ashmole 46, as printed in Horstmann, Alteng. Legenden, Neue Folge (1881), p. 443. Gower has the story of Alcestis in his Confessio Amantis; ed. Pauli, iii. 149.

452. An allusion to the common proverb--'Bis dat, qui cito dat'; he who gives at once, gives twice. Publius Syrus has: 'Bis gratum est, quod dato opus est, ultro si offeras,' v. 44; and again: 'Inopi beneficium bis dat, qui dat celeriter'; v. 235.

465. 'Has no participation in the deed of a thief.' Similarly, in the Squi. Tale, F 537, Chaucer tells us that 'A trew wight and a theef thenken nat oon,' i.e. do not think alike. _Trew_ means 'honest.'

466. The first foot contains _Ne a trew-_; _e_ in _Ne_ is elided.

475, 6. Closely imitated in the Court of Love, st. 61:--

'And argue not for reason ne for skill Againe thy ladies pleasure ne entent, For love will not be counterpleted indeede.'

The substitution of the dissyllabic _indeede_ for Chaucer's monosyllabic _be_ just ruins the scansion of the line; but we must not expect always to find melody in that grossly over-rated poem.

496, 7. Observe that these lines are not in the A-text. They must necessarily have been added after 1382, when Richard II. married Anne of Bohemia, and of course long before 1394, when 'the good queen Anne' died, and her husband at once forsook their favourite residence of Shene, now Richmond; see Annals of England, p. 201.

499. This is a strange question, seeing that Alcestis has already announced her name at l. 432; we must suppose that the poet did not realise that she was _the very_ Alcestis whom he longed to see. But it looks like an oversight, due to his partially rewriting this Prologue.

503. Literally Chaucer's favorite line; for it reappears three times more, viz. in the Kn. Ta., A 1761; March. Ta., E 1986; and Squi. Ta., F 479. And, in the Man of Law's Tale, B 660, we have--'As gentil herte is fulfild of pitee.' It is admirable.

510. Here Chaucer seems to be imitating Froissart; see the Introduction. I cannot find any early account of Alcestis that turns her into a daisy[68]. See notes to ll. 432, 515.

515. Alcestis 'was afterwards brought back from the lower world by Hercules, and restored to her husband'; Lewis and Short, Lat. Dict. s.v. _Alcestis_. And see the Introduction.

522. _Bountee_, goodness. See Clerk. Ta., E 157, 415; and Trench, Sel. Glossary.

526. _Agaton_, Agathon or Agatho; Dante's _Agatone_ (Purg. xxii. 107). An Athenian poet (B.C. 447-400); who wrote a tragedy called 'the Flower.' See the Introduction.

531. _Cibella_, Cybela, or more commonly Cybele, a Phrygian goddess, later worshipped at Rome as Ops or Mater Magna. She was the goddess of the earth, and especially represented its fertility; hence she is naturally said to produce flowers. She here answers to the 'Ceres' of Froissart; see the Introduction.

533. The reference is to the red tips on the white petals of the daisy, the 'wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flower.' This is said to be the gift of Mars, as he was associated with that colour. He is called 'Mars the rede'; see l. 2589 below; Anelida, l. 1; Kn. Ta., A 1969. The colour of the planet Mars is reddish.

In the present passage _reed_ is a sb.; 'And Mars gave redness to her crown.'

539. Referring to the Balade at l. 249. In the A-text, Alcestis was actually mentioned in the refrain; but Chaucer rewrote it so as to exclude her name. He now writes (in l. 540) as if he had forgotten to put it in. Of course ll. 539-541 are peculiar to the B-text, as marked.

542. _Kalender._ 'A kalendar is an almanac by which persons are guided in their computation of time; hence it is used, as here, for a guide or example generally'; Bell. The New E. Dict. quotes this passage, and explains the word by 'a guide, directory; an example, model'; and cites Hamlet, v. 2. 114--'He is the card or _calendar_ of gentry.' Nevertheless, I doubt whether this sense arose from the mere _usefulness_ of the calendar. I believe that Chaucer regarded it in quite another aspect, viz. as containing the _record_ or _list_ of the saints whose lives are worthy of imitation. Hence Schmidt explains the word in Hamlet as 'note-book' or 'record'; as is certainly the case in All's Well, i. 3. 4, which Murray duly quotes with the sense of 'record.' So in the present case _kalender_ does not mean 'example' merely, but _a whole list_ or _complete record of examples_, which gives the word a much greater force. Compare Chaucer's ABC, under the letter _K_, and the note (l. 73).

549. We hence learn that Chaucer's nineteenth[69] and last Legend was to have been the Legend of Alcestis; but he never wrote more than the former _half_ of the work. Cf. A-text, 532.

555. _Thy balade_; see ll. 249-268; F. and Th. read _my_. We here learn that the Ladies about whom the Legends were to be written (l. 557) are all mentioned in the Ballad, which is an important hint. We must of course remove the names of Absalom and Jonathan; and there is reason for supposing that we should exclude Esther. Next, we set aside Lucretia, Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Phyllis, Hypsipyle, Hypermnestra, and Ariadne, whose Legends we possess; observing at the same time that we also have the Legend of Philomela (though she is not mentioned), and of Medea, who shares a Legend with Hypsipyle. The names still left are those of Penelope, Martia, Isoude, Helen, Lavinia, Polyxena, Hero, Laodamia, Canace, and Alcestis. But this list only partially agrees with Chaucer's scheme as given elsewhere, viz. in the Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale. See further in the Introduction.

574. _The grete_, the substance; as in Book of the Duch. 1242; Parl. Foules, 35.

575. 'According as these old authors are pleased to treat (them).'

576. _Shal telle_, has to narrate.

I. THE LEGEND OF CLEOPATRA.

It is not clear what account Chaucer followed; see the Introduction. The chief sources for the history are Plutarch, Appian, Dion Cassius, and Orosius (bk. vi. c. 19). I shall refer to the Life of M. Antonius in my edition of Shakespeare's Plutarch (denoted below by Sh. Plut.). Bech points out that one of Chaucer's sources was Florus; see note to l. 655.

581. Ptolemy XI., or Ptolemy Auletes, king of Egypt, died B.C. 51, leaving two sons, _both_ called Ptolemy, and two daughters, Cleopatra and Arsinoe. Cleopatra was then 17 years of age, and was appointed queen of Egypt in conjunction with her brother, the elder Ptolemy, whom she was to marry; but she was expelled from the throne by Ptolemy's guardians. In B.C. 47 she was replaced upon it by Julius Cæsar, but still in conjunction with her brother. This led to the Alexandrine war, in the course of which this elder Ptolemy perished. After this, she reigned, nominally, in conjunction with the _younger_ Ptolemy, to whom also she was nominally married; but he was still quite a child, and was murdered by her orders in less than four years, after which she was sole queen, in name as well as in reality.

We thus see that the Ptolemy here mentioned may be either of Cleopatra's brothers of that name; but it is more likely that Chaucer refers to the elder of them. Shakespeare also uses the expression 'queen of Ptolemy'; Ant. i. 4. 6.

583. _On a tyme_; viz. not long after the battle of Philippi, which took place in B.C. 42. 'Antonius, going to make war with the Parthians, sent to command Cleopatra to appear personally before him when he came into Cilicia, to answer unto such accusations as were laid against her, being this: that she had aided Cassius and Brutus in their war against him ... Cleopatra on the other side ... guessing by the former access and credit she had with Julius Cæsar and C. Pompey (the son of Pompey the Great) only for her beauty, she began to have good hope that she might more easily win Antonius. For Cæsar and Pompey knew her when she was but a young thing, and knew not then what the world meant; but now she went to Antonius at the age when a woman's beauty is at the prime, and she also of best judgment.'--Sh. Plut. p. 174. Almost immediately after this passage follows the celebrated description of Cleopatra in her barge upon the Cydnus, familiar to all in the words of Shakespeare; Ant. and Cleop. ii. 2. 196.

591. 'Octavius Cæsar reporting all these things unto the Senate, and oftentimes accusing him to the whole people and assembly in Rome, he thereby stirred up all the Romans against him.'--Sh. Plut. p. 202.

592. After the death of his first wife, Fulvia, Antony had married Octavia, sister of Octavianus (better known to us as Augustus). But in a few years he deserted her, and surrendered himself wholly to the charms of Cleopatra. Cf. Ant. and Cleop. iii. 6.

597. Cf. Sh. Plut. p. 192; Ant. and Cleop. i. 4. 55.

605. _Sterve_, to die. See _Starve_, in Trench, Sel. Glossary.

624. _Octovian_, Octavianus. 'Now for Cæsar, he had 250 ships of war, 80,000 footmen, and well near as many horsemen as his enemy Antonius'; Sh. Plut. p. 207.

634. See the account of the battle of Actium, B.C. 31; in Sh. Plut. p. 210. The vivid description here given by Chaucer resembles the parallel passage in the Kn. Tale, A 2600-20, which should be compared. 'The soldiers fought with their pikes, halbards and darts, and threw halbards and darts with fire. Antonius' ships, on the other side, bestowed among them, with their crossbows and engines of battery, great store of shot from their high towers of wood that were set upon their ships.'--Sh. Plut. p. 211. There is some description of the hostile fleets and of the battle in Florus (see note to l. 655), who tells us that, whilst Octavius had 400 ships against the 200 ships of Antony, the latter were nearly double the size of the former; so that the fleets were thus of equal strength.

637. Bell says this is 'a ludicrous anachronism'; but it is nothing of the kind. The word _gonne_ is here used in the sense of 'shot' or 'missile'; and the line means--'with terrible sound out rushes the huge missile,' being hurled from one of the 'engines of battery' mentioned in the last note. It is the missile, not the engine, that 'out goth'; as a moment's reflection would have informed the commentator, whose remark was needless. The use of _gonne_ in the sense of 'missile' is curious, but not unexampled; for, in the Avowynge of Arthur, st. 65, we read that 'there come fliand a _gunne_,' i.e. there came flying along a missile. I believe it is also used in the sense of missile in Sir Ferumbras, 5176, though the passage is not decisive.

Even if this were not the case, there is no 'anachronism'; for _gonne_ was originally used in the sense of 'catapult,' as may be seen by consulting the Prompt. Parvulorum, where the Latin for it is _petraria_, and _mangonale_. The _grisly soun_ alludes to the whizzing of the ponderous missile through the air; Barbour says of a great stone, hurled from a catapult, that 'It flaw out, quhedirand, with a rout,' i.e. it flew out, whirring, with a great noise. See The Bruce, xvii. 684.

On the other hand, in Ho. Fame, 1643, Chaucer certainly uses _gonne_ in the sense of 'cannon'; but that does not affect the sense of the present passage.

638. _Hurtlen_, push, dash, ram one against the other; cf. Kn. Ta., A 2616. 'Somtyme they _hurtled_ to-gyder that they felle grovelyng on the ground'; Morte Arthure; by Sir T. Malory, bk. vii. c. 12. _Heterly_, vehemently, fiercely, occurs frequently in the Wars of Alexander, ed. Skeat (E. E. T. S.) Compare Vergil's description of the battle, in Æn. viii. 689, &c.: 'Una omnes ruere.'

640. _In goth_, in there go. _Goth_ is singular in form, because of its position in the sentence; but it has two nominatives, viz. 'grapnel' and 'shearing-hooks.' The former was a contrivance for clutching the ropes, and the latter for severing them.

642. This is wonderfully graphic. A boarder bursts in with a pole-axe; a sailor, on the defence, flees behind the mast, then dashes forward again, and drives the assailant overboard.

646. _Rent_, rendeth; the present tense.

648. By pouring hard peas upon the hatches, they became so slippery that the boarders could not stand.

649. Some carried pots full of quicklime, which they threw into the eyes of their enemies. See Notes and Queries, 5 S. x. 188. The English did this very thing, when attacking a French fleet, in the time of Henry III. Strutt (Manners and Customs, 1774, ii. 11) quotes from Matthew Paris to this effect:--'Calcem quoque vivam et in pulverém subtilem reductam, in altum projicientes, vento illam ferente, Francorum oculos excaecaverunt.' Cf. Æn. viii. 694.

652. _Put_, short for _putteth_, puts; pres. tense.

653. _To-go_, disperse themselves; pres. tense. The prefix _to_ has the same force as the Lat. _dis-_, i.e. 'in different directions.' We even find _to-ga_ used as a past tense in Barbour's Bruce (viii. 351, ix. 263, 269,