This is one of the many passages in which Chaucer uses the language of astronomy for telling time. The meaning is that the cock crew each hour, when the sun had risen fifteen degrees higher.

12. 59. My lief is faren in londe.

one has gone away.

My loved

103. Swevenes engendren, etc. See note on Prol., 1. 417.

13. 120. Lo Catoun. Dionysius Cato, to

whom was ascribed a collection of maxims, De Moribus, used in Chaucer's time as a text-book for beginners in Latin.

143. Lauriol, centaure, etc. For an explanation of these botanical names see the Oxford Chaucer, v. 252.

15. 33. Macrobeus. Latin writer of the fifth century, annotator of Cicero's Somnium Scipionis.

16. 367. The month in which the world bigan. There was an old notion that the creation took place on the eighteenth of March.

369. Y-passed were also, etc. When March was gone, and thirty-two days more; i. e., when it was the third of May. 374. The signe of Taurus. The sun was in the zodiacal sign, or constellation, of Taurus, and had passed the twenty-first degree.

407. Genilon. The traitor who caused the death of Roland, in the Chanson de Roland Sinon persuaded the Trojans to admit the wooden horse.

421. Augustyn . . . Boece... Bradwardyn. Famous ecclesiastical writers, St. Augustine, Boethius, and Thomas Bradwardine, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1349.

17. 451. Phisiologus. A work on natural history, in Latin, well known to the Middle Ages.

473. Boece.

Boethius (see 1. 421) was also author of a treatise on music.

492. Daun Burnel the Asse. A satirical poem of the twelfth century, by Nigel Wireker.

18. 527. O Gaufred. Geoffrey de Vinsauf, who wrote verses lamenting the death of Richard I.

536. Ilioun. The citadel of Troy.
574. Iakke Straw. One of the leaders in
the Peasants' Rebellion of 1381.

22. 406. Chaunge my cheste. "The old man is ready to exchange his chest, containing all his worldly gear, for a single hair-cloth, to be used as his shroud." (Skeat).

24. 561. Avicen. Avicenna, an Arabian physician, wrote as his chief work a medical treatise known as the Canon. The subdivisions are in Arabic called fen.

BALADE DE BON CONSEYL

25. 2. Suffyce unto thy good. Let thy wealth be sufficient unto thee.

9. In trust of hir. Fortune.

22. Thou Vache. Sir Philip la Vache, to whom the poem is addressed. See an article by Miss Edith Rickert in Modern Philology, xi. 209 f.

THE COMPLAINT OF CHAUCER

26. 22. Conquerour of Brutes Albioun. King Henry IV, who came to the throne in 1399 through the deposition of Richard II. Brutes Albioun-the Albion, or England, of Brutus, a legendary descendant of Aeneas, who first reigned in the island.

PIERS THE PLOWMAN 26. Of this poem, which until lately has been accepted as the work of William Langland, there are several versions, the work of different men, and produced at different times during the last forty years of the fourteenth century. The earliest, or so-called A-text, was written about 1365, and was the basis of subsequent revisions. The question of authorship has been argued at great length by Professor John M. Manly, and others, in Modern Philology; and though uncertainties still exist, it is hardly to be questioned that several people had a share in the work, and that the traditional ascription to Langland is erroneous.

27. 39. Qui loquitur, etc. He who speaks

evil.

55. Al the foure ordres. The mendicant friars were the Carmelites, or white friars; the Augustinians; the Dominicans, or black friars; and the Minorites, or grey friars.

NOAH'S FLOOD

The play is taken from the Chester miracle cycle. The text here followed is that of Harleian MS. 2124, edited by Dr. Hermann Deimling for the Early English Text Society (Extra Series, lxii). The text has been modernized, except that rhyme-words and the original word order have been preserved. Stage directions have been translated from the original Latin. Waterleaders and Drawers of Dee. Members of the gild of water-carriers, who presented the play. The River Dee flows through Chester.

LE MORTE DARTHUR: PREFACE

44. William Caxton. Caxton (c. 1422-1491), the first English printer. The first book to be printed in English was issued at Bruges in 1474; two years later Caxton set up his press in Westminster.

The Morte Darthur was published in 1485.

37. Stalled. Installed.

72. Aretted. Considered to be.

76. Polichronicon. A history of the world, and encyclopædia of universal knowledge, by Ranulph Higden (d. 1364). 82. Bochas. Boccaccio. De Casu, etc: Concerning the Fall of Great Men.

84. Galfridus. Geoffrey of Monmouth, author of the Historia Regum Britanniae, (c. 1136), the most famous of all AngloLatin chronicles.

In reading Spenser's verse, a final -ed should always be given syllabic value. Book I narrates the adventures of the Knight of Holiness.

51. 20. Gloriana. Standing in the allegory for Queen Elizabeth.

28. Lovely ladie. Una, the personification of Truth.

52. 79. Warlike beech. Lances were frequently of beech wood.

53. 127-234. The passage omitted gives an account of the Knight's combat with the foul monster Error, and of his ultimate triumph.

54. 253. Aged sire. Archimago, the enchanter, represents hypocrisy or false religion.

55. 314. Saintes and popes. In accordance with the purpose of the allegory, Archimago is made a Catholic.

55. 318. Morpheus. God of sleep.

328. Blacke Plutoes griesly dame. Proserpine, wife of Pluto, king of the lower regions.

332. Gorgon. Demogorgon, one of the
greatest of the infernal powers, whose
name it was dangerous to utter.

333. Cocytus, Styx. Rivers of Hades.
348. Tethys. The ocean.
349. Cynthia. The moon.

352. Double gates. According to clas-
sical legend, true dreams, sent to men
from the house of Sleep, issued forth
through a door of horn; false dreams,
through a door of ivory.
Cf. 1. 393.
Spenser substitutes silver for horn.
361ff. Note in this stanza the skilful sug-
gestion of sense by sound.

56. 376. Dryer braine. Brain too dry or feverish. It was supposed that lack of moisture in the brain was the cause of fitful, dream-broken sleep.

Stanza XLV. Archimago fashions one of his sprites into the likeness of Una, and by the aid of the false dream deceives the Red Cross Knight into believing Una false to him. In Canto II the Knight deserts Una and flees from Archimago's cabin. Meeting on his way a Saracen knight Sansfoy, with a beautiful lady, he kills the knight and takes the lady Duessa (Falsehood, though she is at present going under the name of Fidessa-Faith), as his companion. Una meanwhile has set forth in search of her knight, and has lost her way in a wood.

CANTO XI

57. In the interval between the third and eleventh cantos Una and the Red Cross Knight, who had been parted from each other by Archimago, and forced to undergo many hardships, are reunited by Arthur, who rescues the Knight from the castle of the giant Orgoglio. After this deliverance Una leads the Knight to the house of Holiness, where he is purged of his sin, learns his lineage, and his name, George:

66 'Thou.

Shalt be a saint, and thine own nation's frend

And patrone: thou Saint George shalt called be,

Saint George of mery England, the signe of victoree." (I. x. 66).

Then follows the struggle between George and the dragon (the devil), occupying the entire eleventh canto, which is here reprinted without omission.

58. 43. Faire ympe of Phoebus, etc. Clio, muse of History, daughter of Phoebus and Mnemosyne (Memory).

56. Till I of warres, etc. "Spenser was apparently planning for his later books or for his second part, some celebration of the war with Philip II. Bryton fieldes

6

62. Thy second tenor. Melody of lower pitch." (Dodge.)

63. Man of God his . . . of-God's arms.

armes. Man

59. 74. So couched neare. Placed so close together.

60. 167. Hagard hauke. A wild hawk.

168. Above his hable might. Beyond the limit of his strength.

172. He so disseized, etc. He, the dragon, being thus relieved of his great burden. 61. 186. His neighbour element. The earth. 187. The blustring brethren. Sometimes explained as the winds; possibly refers to both winds and sea, combining against the land.

189. Each other to avenge. Take vengeance on each other.

230. Him. The Knight.

62. 235. That great champion. Hercules, the occasion of whose death was the shirt poisoned by blood of the centaur Nessus. 267. Silo. The pool of Siloam. 269. Cephise (Cephissus) . . . Hebrus. Greek rivers.

278. Above his wonted pitch.

than usual.

Higher

63. 300. As eagle, fresh out of the ocean wave. Every ten years the eagle mounts to the circle of fire and thence plunges into the ocean, from which it emerges with fresh plumage." (Dodge.)

303. Eyas hauke. Newly fledged hawk. 337. Ne living wight, etc. Nor would any living person have promised him life. 64. 356. Engorged. This is the reading in edi

tions of Spenser, but it makes no good sense; engorged means glutted with. May Spenser have intended engored-wounded. hence, aroused, infuriated (?) as in Faerie Queene, II. viii. 42:

"As salvage bull, whom two fierce mastives bayt,

When rancour doth with rage him once engore."

381. The warlike pledge. The shield. 65. 414. The crime of our first father's fell. The occasion of the crime, etc. 459. Her. Object of salutes.

465. He. The dragon. Himself. The knight.

PROTHALAMION

66. The poem was written in honor of the approaching double marriage of the Ladies Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset, daughters of the Earl of Worcester, in 1596. It commemorates a visit made by the ladies, in barges on the river, to Essex House, residence of the Earl of Essex.

6-9. Discontent . . . empty shaddowes. A reference to Spenser's vain effort for

political preferment after the publication of the second three books of the Faerie Queene.

67. 67. Somers-heat. Pun on Somerset. CS. 132. Bricky towres. The group of buildings by the Thames called The Temple, formerly headquarters of the Knights Templar, now given over to lawyers. 137. A stately place. Essex House, formerly residence of the Earl of Leicester, an early patron of Spenser's, who had died in 1588.

147. Dreadfull . . . thunder. Alluding to the sack of Cadiz in 1596 by the Earl of Essex.

148. Hercules two pillors. Rocky eminences on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar.

daring mixture of things celestial with things mundane." (Schelling.)

79. 9. Palmer. Originally a pilgrim who had been to Jerusalem and had brought back a palm-branch as a token; later applied to professional pilgrims, who spent their whole time travelling from one shrine to another.

80. 42. Angels. A pun on the use of the word as the name of a coin.

THE CONCLUSION

Found in Raleigh's Bible after his death; said to have been written the night before his execution.

SOUTHWELL: THE BURNING BABE Drummond of Hawthornden in his notes records that Ben Jonson said that" so he had written that piece of his (Southwell's), The Burning Babe, he would have been content to destroy many of his."

SHAKESPEARE: HARK, HARK! THE LARK 82. Compare the second of Lyly's songs, p. 77.

FEAR NO MORE

Dirge sung over the body of the supposedly dead Imogen, disguised as a boy, Fidele.

CAMPION: WHEN THOU MUST HOME

83. Bullen (Lyrics from Elizabethan Song Books) remarks that for romantic beauty this can hardly be matched outside the sonnets of Shakespeare.

note on

5. Prick-song. Harmony written or pricked down in opposition to plainsong. (Chappell's Popular Music of the Olden Time.)

7. At heaven's gates she claps her wings. Cf. Shakespeare's "Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings," p. 82.

CHERRY-RIPE

Cherry-ripe" was the cry of street venders of cherries.

DRAYTON: AGINCOURT

85. The full title runs To the Cambro-Britons and their Harp His Ballad of Agincourt. Cambro-Britons-Welsh, who fought valiantly in the battle. Henry V, invading France to make good his claim to the French throne, in 1415 won the battle of Agincourt from a French army four times as numerous as his own.

41. Poitiers, Cressy. Like Agincourt, Eattles of the Hundred Years' War, fought in 1356 and 1346 respectively, and like Agincourt, English victories against great odds.

45. Grandsire. John of Gaunt, son of Edward III.

86. 82. Bilbows.

Swords; the name comes from Bilboa, a Spanish town famous for the swords it made.

113. St. Crispin's day. October 25.

BEN JONSON: TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED MASTER, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 87. Prefaced to the First Folio edition of Shakespeare's works, 1623.

20. Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont. All buried in Westminster Abbey. Beaumont, Sir Francis Beaumont, the dramatist, who died a few weeks before Shakespeare.

29, 30. Lyly, Kyd, Marlowe. Immediate predecessors of Shakespeare in the English drama.

32. Seek for names. Search critically for the names of dramatists with whom to compare Shakespeare; only the greatest names will do.

33, 34. Eschylus, Euripides, Sophocles. Greek writers of tragedy, of the fifth century B. C.

35. Pacuvius, Accius. Latin writers of
tragedy of the second century, B. C.

Him of Cordova. Seneca, the Stoic
philosopher and, supposedly, tragic writer.
36. Buskin. The cothurnus. or thick-
soled boot, worn by actors in classical
tragedy to secure the dignity lent by
greater stature; hence, the word stands for
tragedy itself.
37. Socks.

Likewise representative of comedy, since the thin-soled soccus was worn in comedy.

88. 51. Tart Aristophanes. Most famous of Greek satirical dramatists; he wrote in the fifth century B. C.

52. Terence, Plautus. The best writers of Latin comedy, of the second century B. C. 71. Swan of Avon. Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon.

77, 78. Rage or influence. A reference to the astrological belief that each planet exerted either a good or an evil power over the lives of men.

BROWNE: ON THE COUNTESS DOWAGER OF PEMBROKE

3. Sidney's sister. It was to this lady, Mary Sidney, later Countess of Pembroke, that Sir Philip Sidney dedicated his Arcadia. Pembroke's mother. The third Earl of Pembroke, a minor poet, to whom, with his brother, the first folio of Shakespeare was dedicated, was the Countess's son.

This epitaph, delicate and chastely beautiful, has been erroneously ascribed to Ben Jonson. There is a second and inferior stanza, which may not be by the same hand.