1151. 'Receive all with submission.' Fr. en gré, gratefully, in good part. sent, sendeth; present tense, as in Piers Plowman, C. xxii. 434. The past tense is sente, which would not rime.
1152. 'For it is very reasonable that He should prove (or test) that which He created.'
1153. boghte, (hath) redeemed. See St. James, i. 13.
1162. Here Petrarch ends his narrative, and here, beyond all doubt, Chaucer's translation originally ended also. From this point to the end is the work of a later period, and in his best manner, though unsuited to the coy Clerk. He easily links on his addition by the simple expression lordinges, herkneth; and in l. 1170, he alludes to the Wife of Bath, of whom probably he had never thought when first translating the story.
We can thus understand the stanza in the footnote, on p. 424. It is genuine, but was rejected at the time of adding ll. 1163-1212. It was afterwards expanded into The Monkes Prologue, with the substitution of the patient Prudence for the patient Griselda; see B. 3083-6.
1177. Here the metre changes; the stanzas are of six lines; and all six stanzas are linked together. There are but three rimes throughout; -ence in the first and third lines of every stanza, -aille in the second, fourth, and sixth, (requiring eighteen rimes in all), and -inde in the fifth line. It is a fine example even from a metrical point of view alone.
1188. Chichevache, for chiche vache, i. e. lean cow. The allusion is to an old fable, of French origin, which describes a monstrous cow named Chiche Vache as feeding entirely upon patient wives, and being very lean in consequence of the scarcity of her diet. A later form of the fable adds a second beast, named Bicorne (two-horned), who, by adopting the wiser course of feeding upon patient husbands, was
always fat and in good case. Mr. Wright says—'M. Achille Jubinal, in the notes to his Mystères inédits du xv Siècle, tom. i. p. 390, has printed a French poetical description of Chichevache from a MS. of the fourteenth century. In the French miracle of St. Geneviève, of the fifteenth century (Jubinal, ib. p. 281), a man says satirically to the saint,
"Gardez vous de la chicheface,
El vous mordra s'el vous encontre,