Theras Mercurie sorted him to dwelle.
(2) From the Knightes Tale; A 2809:—
His spirit chaunged hous, and wente ther,
As I cam never, I can nat tellen wher....
... wher they dwelle;
Arcite is cold, ther Mars his soule gye.
The change from Mercury, as the conductor of souls in general, to Mars, as the conductor of the martial soul of Arcite, is well worth notice.
§ 19. These specimens furnish good examples of Chaucer's method. Palemon and Arcite was, at first, a reasonably close imitation of Boccaccio's poem of the Teseide, which took its name from the hero Theseus. But in its second form, it was so much altered as to become, to all intents, a truly original poem. Thanks to the patient labour of Mr. Henry Ward, who collated the Teseide and the Knightes Tale throughout, line by line, we can now tell that 'out of 2250 of Chaucer's lines, he has only translated 270 (less than one-eighth); that only 374 more lines bear a general likeness to Boccaccio's, and only 132 more, a slight likeness; [so that] any talk of the Knightes Tale being a "translation only," or "taken bodily from the Teseide" (of 9054 lines), is of course absurd. Chaucer's work is an adaptation of his original.'—F. J. Furnivall, A Temporary Preface of the Six-text Edition of the Canterbury Tales, p. 104.
A table shewing the general resemblance between certain lines in the Knightes Tale and lines in the Teseide, is given in the Notes; to which I must refer the reader for further information. I will merely add here that Chaucer also consulted the Thebais of Statius, which was one of Boccaccio's authorities.
§ 20. In order to give a clear idea of the general contents of Boccaccio's poem, I here quote in full the analysis of it made by Tyrwhitt, and printed in his Introductory Discourse:—