[543] Malone. An Irish critic and scholar of the eighteenth century, best known by his edition of Shakespeare's plays. [544] Wolsey's Soliloquy. See Shakespeare's Henry VIII. iii, 2. Cardinal Wolsey was prime minister of England in the reign of Henry VIII. [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. [546] Account of the coronation. See Henry VIII. iv, 1. [547] Compliment to Queen Elizabeth. See Henry VIII. v, 5. [548] Bad rhythm. Too much importance must not be attached to these matters in deciding authorship, as critics disagree about them. [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. [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. [551] Chaucer. (See note 33.) [552] Saadi. A Persian poet, supposed to have lived in the thirteenth century. His best known poems are his odes. [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 [OE]dipus, 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. [554] Pope. (See note 88.) [555] Dryden. (See note 35.) [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." [557] Lydgate. John Lydgate was an English poet who lived a generation later than Chaucer; in his Troy Book and other poems he probably borrowed from the sources used by Chaucer; he called himself "Chaucer's disciple." [558] Caxton. William Caxton, the English author, more famous as the first English printer, was not born until after Chaucer's death. The work from which Emerson supposes the poet to have borrowed Caxton's translation of Recueil des Histoires de Troye, the first printed English book, appeared about 1474.