273-87. Not in the original; perhaps added in revision.
277. The word alle, being plural, is dissyllabic. Thing is often a plural form, being an A. S. neuter noun. The words over, ever, never are, in Chaucer, generally monosyllables, or nearly so; just as o'er, e'er, ne'er are treated as monosyllables by our poets in general. Hence the scansion is—'Ov'r al | lë thing |,' &c.
289. The word at is inserted from the Cambridge MS.; all the other six MSS. omit it, which makes the passage one of extreme difficulty. Tyrwhitt reads 'Or Ylion brent, or Thebes the citee.' Of course he means brende, past tense, not brent, the past participle; and his conjecture amounts to inserting or before Thebes. It is better to insert at, as in MS. Cm.; see Gilman's edition. The sense is—'When Pyrrhus broke the wall, before Ilium burnt, (nor) at the city of Thebes, nor at Rome,' &c. Nat (l. 290) = Ne at, as in Hl. Ylion, in medieval romance, meant 'the citadel' of Troy; see my note to l. 936 of the Legend of Good Women. Tyrwhitt well observes that 'Thebes the citee' is a French phrase. He quotes 'dedans Renes la cite,' Froissart, v. i. c. 225.
295-315. Not in the original, and clearly a later addition. They include an allusion to Boethius (see next note).
295. In the margin of the Ellesmere MS. is written—'Vnde Ptholomeus, libro i. cap. 8. Primi motus celi duo sunt, quorum vnus est qui mouet totum semper ab Oriente in Occidentem vno modo super orbes, &c. Item aliter vero motus est qui mouet orbem stellarum currencium
contra motum primum, videlicet, ab Occidente in Orientem super alios duos polos.' The old astronomy imagined nine spheres revolving round the central stationary earth; of the seven innermost, each carried with it one of the seven planets, viz. the Moon, Venus, Mercury, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; the eighth sphere, that of the fixed stars, had a slow motion from west to east, round the axis of the zodiac (super alios duos polos), to account for the precession of the equinoxes; whilst the ninth or outermost sphere, called the primum mobile, or the sphere of first motion, had a diurnal revolution from east to west, carrying everything with it. This exactly corresponds with Chaucer's language. He addresses the outermost sphere or primum mobile (which is the ninth if reckoning from within, but the first from without), and accuses it of carrying with it everything in its irresistible westward motion; a motion contrary to that of the 'natural' motion, viz. that in which the sun advances along the signs of the zodiac. The result was that the evil influence of the planet Mars prevented the marriage. It is clear that Chaucer was thinking of certain passages in Boethius, as will appear from consulting his own translation of Boethius, ed. Morris, pp. 21, 22, 106, and 110. I quote a few lines to shew this:—
'O þou maker of þe whele þat bereþ þe sterres, whiche þat art fastned to þi perdurable chayere, and turnest þe heuene wiþ a rauyssyng sweighe, and constreinest þe sterres to suffren þi lawe'; pp. 21, 22.
'þe regioun of þe fire þat eschaufiþ by þe swifte moeuyng of þe firmament'; p. 110.
The original is—
'O stelliferi conditor orbis