poet of Italy,” as the source whence the author has quoted. When we consider the poet’s high place in literature and at Court, which could not fail to make him free of the hospitalities of the brilliant little Lombard States; his familiarity with the tongue and the works of Italy’s greatest bards, dead and living; the reverential regard which he paid to the memory of great poets, of which we have examples in “The House of Fame,” and at the close of “Troilus and Cressida” <4>; along with his own testimony in the Prologue to The Clerk’s Tale, we cannot fail to construe that testimony as a declaration that the Tale was actually told to Chaucer by the lips of Petrarch, in 1373, the very year in which Petrarch translated it into Latin, from Boccaccio’s “Decameron.”<5> Mr Bell notes the objection to this interpretation, that the words are put into the mouth, not of the poet, but of the Clerk; and meets it by the counter- objection, that the Clerk, being a purely imaginary personage, could not have learned the story at Padua from Petrarch — and therefore that Chaucer must have departed from the dramatic assumption maintained in the rest of the dialogue. Instances could be adduced from Chaucer’s writings to show that such a sudden “departure from the dramatic assumption” would not be unexampled: witness the “aside” in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, where, after the jolly Dame has asserted that “half so boldly there can no man swear and lie as a woman can”, the poet hastens to interpose, in his own person, these two lines: “I say not this by wives that be wise, But if it be when they them misadvise.” And again, in the Prologue to the “Legend of Good Women,” from a description of the daisy — “She is the clearness and the very light, That in this darke world me guides and leads,” the poet, in the very next lines, slides into an address to his lady: “The heart within my sorrowful heart you dreads And loves so sore, that ye be, verily, The mistress of my wit, and nothing I,” &c. When, therefore, the Clerk of Oxford is made to say that he will tell a tale — “The which that I Learn’d at Padova of a worthy clerk, As proved by his wordes and his werk. He is now dead, and nailed in his chest, I pray to God to give his soul good rest. Francis Petrarc’, the laureate poete, Highte this clerk, whose rhetoric so sweet Illumin’d all Itaile of poetry. . . . But forth to tellen of this worthy man, That taughte me this tale, as I began.” . . .