'Car le droit estat d'innocence
Ressemblent (?) proprement la table
Blanche, polie, qui est able
A recevoir, sans nul contraire,
Ce qu'on y veut peindre ou portraire.'
The rime of table and able settles the point. Mr. Brock points out a parallel passage in Boethius, which Chaucer thus translates:—'the soule hadde ben naked of it-self, as a mirour or a clene parchemin.... Right as we ben wont som tyme by a swifte pointel to ficchen lettres emprented in the smothenesse or in the pleinnesse of the table of wex,
or in parchemin that ne hath no figure ne note in it'; bk. v. met. 4. But I doubt if Chaucer knew much of Boethius in 1369; and in the present passage he clearly refers to a prepared white surface, not to a tablet of wax. 'Youth and white paper take any impression'; Ray's Proverbs.
791. An allusion to the old proverb which is given in Hending in the form—'Whose yong lerneth, olt [old] he ne leseth'; Hending's Prov. l. 45. Kemble gives the medieval Latin—'Quod puer adsuescit, leviter dimittere nescit'; Gartner, Dicteria, p. 24 b. Cf. Horace, Epist. i. 2. 69; also Rom. de la Rose, 13094.
799. John of Gaunt married Blaunche at the age of nineteen.
805. Imitated from Machault's Dit du Vergier and Fontaine Amoureuse.