[Footnote 540:  Spanish voyages.  In the sixteenth century, Spain was still a power upon the high seas, and the tales of her conquests and treasures in the New World were like tales of romance.]

[Footnote 541:  Prestige.  Can you give an English equivalent for this French word?]

[Footnote 542:  Which no single genius, etc.  In the same way, some critics assure us, the poems credited to the Greek poet, Homer, were built up by a number of poets.]

[Footnote 543:  Malone.  An Irish critic and scholar of the eighteenth century, best known by his edition of Shakespeare’s plays.]

[Footnote 544:  Wolsey’s Soliloquy.  See Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. III, 2.  Cardinal Wolsey was prime minister of England in the reign of Henry VIII.]

[Footnote 545:  Scene with Cromwell.  See Henry VIII. III, 2.  Thomas Cromwell was the son of an English blacksmith; he rose to be lord high chamberlain of England in the reign of Henry VIII., but, incurring the King’s displeasure, was executed on a charge of treason.]

[Footnote 546:  Account of the coronation.  See Henry VIII. IV, 1.]

[Footnote 547:  Compliment to Queen Elizabeth.  See Henry VIII. V, 5.]

[Footnote 548:  Bad rhythm.  Too much importance must not be attached to these matters in deciding authorship, as critics disagree about them.]

[Footnote 549:  Value his memory, etc.  The Greeks, in appreciation of the value of memory to the poet, represented the Muses as the daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory.]

[Footnote 550:  Homer.  A Greek poet to whom is assigned the authorship of the two greatest Greek poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey; he is said to have lived about a thousand years before Christ.]

[Footnote 551:  Chaucer. (See note 33.)]

[Footnote 552:  Saadi.  A Persian poet, supposed to have lived in the thirteenth century.  His best known poems are his odes.]

[Footnote 553:  Presenting Thebes, etc.  This quotation is from Milton’s poem, Il Penseroso.  Milton here names the three most popular subjects of Greek tragedy,—­the story of Oedipus, the ill-fated King of Thebes who slew his father; the tale of the descendants of Pelops, King of Pisa, who seemed born to woe—­Agamemnon was one of his grandsons; the third subject was the tale of Troy and the heroes of the Trojan war,—­called “divine” because the Greeks represented even the gods as taking part in the contest.]

[Footnote 554:  Pope. (See note 88.)]

[Footnote 555:  Dryden. (See note 35.)]

[Footnote 556:  Chaucer is a huge borrower.  Taine, the French critic, says on this subject:  “Chaucer was capable of seeking out in the old common forest of the Middle Ages, stories and legends, to replant them in his own soil and make them send out new shoots....  He has the right and power of copying and translating because by dint of retouching he impresses ... his original work.  He recreates what he imitates.”]