The notion that the citing of “Pernaso” and “Cithero” in the same breath is meant to exhibit the Franklin as “a burel man” is dispelled by literary history. Cicero as a master of style had long been invoked to teach poetry. _Poetria_, as conceived by the medieval manuals, is essentially elaboration of style.[35] That it is a distinct mode of composition is never even hinted. Focused on diction and devoted to elaboration, it draws upon the ancient _colores_ until poetic is indistinguishable from rhetoric. Either, then, Chaucer is merely accepting this merger, without particular intention in his “Pernaso” and “Cithero,” or he is hinting that the very conception hinders straightforward narrative. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the English word _rhetoric_ denoted style generally, whether in prose or in verse. So _rhetor_ or _rhetorien_ meant master of style, and was freely applied to poets. The familiar reference to Petrarch, therefore, is usually taken as general praise. Fraunceys Petrark, the laureat poete, Highte this clerk, whos rethoryke swete Enlumined al Itaille of poetrye. _Clerk’s Prologue_, E. 31. Nor should we pause over the conjunction of “rethoryke” and “poetrye,” were it not identical with that of “Cithero” and “Pernaso.” Even if this pairing, like that, merely reflects medieval habit without reflecting on it, the Clerk’s prologue as a whole is sufficiently definite. Repeating the Host’s term “heigh style,” it goes on to consider Petrarch in this aspect. The Host had been quite precise. Your termes, your colours, and your figures, Kepe hem in stoor til so be ye endyte Heigh style, as whan that men to kinges write. _Clerk’s Prologue_, E. 16. Whether or not “heigh style” is a misappropriation of a phrase of Petrarch’s, its implication here is both definite and significant. “As whan that men to kinges write” makes “endyte” refer unmistakably to _dictamen_.[36] The Host deprecates the perversion of this to the telling of a tale. His sarcasm is directed not vaguely at grandiloquence, but specifically at the application of _dictamen_ to story-telling. To measure its significance, one must read the doctrine pervading _poetria_ and _dictamen_ alike. That doctrine is rhetoric; it is nothing more and nothing else. The Clerk, taking up “heigh style,” admits that it is a hindrance in Petrarch’s descriptive opening.