[Footnote 1:  Scott suggests that the allusion is to the Duke of Buckingham, who was often satirized for the slow progress of his great mansion at Chefden.]

[Footnote 2:  Boccaccio did not invent this stanza, which had been used in both French and Italian before his day, but he did constitute it the Italian form for heroic verse.]

[Footnote 3:  Rymer misled Dryden.  There is no trace of Provencal influence on Chaucer.]

[Footnote 4:  The foundation layer of color in a painting.]

[Footnote 5:  “Verses without content, melodious trifles.”—­Ars Poet. 322.]

[Footnote 6:  Jeremy Collier, in his Short View of the Immortality and Profaneness of the Stage, 1698.]

[Footnote 7:  “Energetic, irascible, unyielding, vehement.”—­Horace, Ars Poet.121.]

[Footnote 8:  “Whithersoever the fates drag us to and fro, let us follow.”—­Virgil, AEneid, v. 709.]

[Footnote 9:  The statements that follow as to Chaucer’s sources are mostly not in accord with the results of modern scholarship.]

[Footnote 10:  The plot of neither of these poems was original with Chaucer.]

[Footnote 11:  “Plenty has made me poor.”—­Meta. iii, 466.]

[Footnote 12:  By Ben Jonson.]

[Footnote 13:  Cowley]

[Footnote 14:  ’Too much a poet’—­Martial iii 44 (not Catullus)]

[Footnote 15:  Suited to the ears of that time]

[Footnote 16:  Speght, whom modern scholarship has shown to be right in this matter.]

[Footnote 17:  What follows on Chaucer’s life is full of errors.]

[Footnote 18:  Wondered at]

[Footnote 19:  A spurious “Plowman’s Tale” was included in the older editions of Chaucer.]

[Footnote 20:  A law term for slander of a man of high rank, involving more severe punishment than ordinary slander.]

[Footnote 21:  Henry II. and Thomas a Becket.]

[Footnote 22:  Dr. James Drake wrote a reply to Jeremy Collier’s Short View.]

[Footnote 23:  “He did the first injury”]

[Footnote 24:  A Neapolitan physician who wrote on physiognomy.]

[Footnote 25:  “I wish all this unsaid.”]

[Footnote 26:  Reckon.]

[Footnote 27:  Their.]

[Footnote 28:  Must.]

[Footnote 29:  The corrupt state of the text of this passage is enough to explain why Dryden found Chaucer rough.]

[Footnote 30:  “Many words which have now fallen out of use shall be born again; and others which are now in honor shall fall, if custom wills it, in the force of which lie the judgement and law and rules of speech.”—­Horace Ars Poet. 70-72.]

[Footnote 31:  “It is easy to add to what is already invented.”]

[Footnote 32:  Dionco and Fiametta sang together a long time of Arcite and Palamon.]

[Footnote 33:  Not by Chaucer.]