952. Ovyde; see Metamorph. xi. 174-193. But Chaucer seems to have purposely altered the story, since Ovid attributes the betrayal of the secret to Midas' barber, not his wife; and again, Ovid says that the barber dug a hole, and whispered it into the pit. Chaucer's version is an improved one. Cf. Troil. iii. 1389.
961. Cf. Rom. de la Rose, 16724-32.
968. Dryden is plainer, and less polite:—'But she must burst or blab.' Cf. Rom. de la Rose, 16568-9.
972. bitore, bittern; bumbleth, makes a bellowing noise, which is also expressed by bumping or booming. Note that MS. Cm. has
bumbith. Owing to the loud booming note of the male bittern, it is called in A. S. rāre-dumle or rāre-dumbla, from rārian, to roar; see Wright's Glossaries. In provincial English, it is called a butter-bump, or a bumble; or, from its frequenting moist places, a bog-bumper, a bog-drum, or a bull o' the bog; see Swainson's Provincial Names of British Birds, E. D. S., p. 146. It was formerly thought that the cry was produced by the bird plunging its bill into mud and then blowing, as in the present passage; others thought that it put its bill into a reed, a view taken by Dryden, as he here has the line:—'And, as a bittern bumps within a reed.' Sir T. Browne, in his Vulgar Errors, bk. iii. c. 27, controverts these notions, and attributes the note to the conformation of the bird's organs of voice. 'The same contradiction of the common notion is given, from personal experience, by the Rev. S. Fovargue, in his New Catalogue of Vulgar Errors, pp. 19-21'; note to Sir T. Browne, ed. S. Wilkin. The same editor further refers us to papers by Dr. Latham and Mr. Yarrell in the Linnaean Transactions, vols. iv, xv, and xvi. See Prof. Newton's Dict. of Birds.
981. There is not much 'remnant' of the tale; Ovid adds that some reeds grew out of the pit, which, when breathed upon by the South wind, uttered the words which had been buried.
992. This reminds us of Chaucer's own vision of Alcestis and her nineteen attendant ladies in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women.
997. Cf. Gower, Conf. Amantis, i. 93:—
'In a forest, there under a tree
He sigh where sat a creature,