As regards the languages in which Chaucer was skilled, we may first of all observe that, like his contemporaries, he was totally ignorant of Greek. There are some nine or ten quotations from Plato, three from Homer, two from Aristotle, and one from Euripides; but they are all taken at second-hand, through the medium of Boethius. The sole quotation from Herodotus in the Canterbury Tales is copied from Jerome. On the other hand, Chaucer was remarkable for his knowledge of Italian, in which it does not appear that any other English writer of his period was at all skilled. His obligations to Boccaccio are well known; the Filostrato being the principal source of the long poem of Troilus, whilst the influence of the Teseide appears not only in the Knightes Tale, but in the Parliament of Foules, in Anelida, and (to the extent of five stanzas) in Troilus. We also find a few references, as Dr. K[:o]ppell has shewn, to Boccaccio's Amorosa Visione. With Dante's Divina Commedia he seems to have been especially familiar, as he quotes from all parts of it; we may note, however, that the greatest number of quotations is taken from the Inferno; whilst the only cantos of the Paradiso which he cites are the first, the fourteenth, the twenty-second, and the thirty-third. The poem which most bears the impress of Dante is The House of Fame; in the Canterbury Tales, the principal borrowings from that author appear in the story of Ugolino (in the Monkes Tale); in some of the stanzas of the Invocation at the beginning of the Second Nonnes Tale (one of which bears a remarkable resemblance to a stanza in the Prioresses Tale[80]); and in the very express reference which occurs in the Wife of Bath's Tale (D 1125). Chaucer's sole quotation from the Italian works of Petrarch is in Troilus, where he translates the eighty-eighth Sonnet. It must not be forgotten, at the same time, that Chaucer was further indebted to Boccaccio's Latin works, entitled De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, De Genealogia Deorum, and De Mulieribus Claris. On the other hand, Prof. Lounsbury is perfectly justified in contending that 'there is not the slightest proof that Chaucer had a knowledge of the existence' of the Decameron. Reasonable carefulness will certainly shew that he was wholly ignorant of it; and the notion that Chaucer borrowed the general plan of his Tales from that of his Italian predecessor, is wholly baseless; the plans are, in fact, more remarkable for their divergence than for their similarity. The only apparent point of contact between Chaucer and the Decameron is in the Tale of Griselda; and in this case we know clearly that it was from Petrarch's Latin version, and not from the Italian, that the story was really derived.