1. So the Man of Law, in the prologue to his Tale, is made to say that Chaucer “can but lewedly (ignorantly or imperfectly) on metres and on rhyming craftily.” But the humility of those apologies is not justified by the care and finish of his earlier poems.
2. Born: burnish, polish: the poet means, that his verses do not display the eloquence or brilliancy of Cicero in setting forth his subject-matter.
3. Galfrid: Geoffrey de Vinsauf to whose treatise on poetical composition a less flattering allusion is made in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. See note 33 to that Tale.
4. Stirp: race, stock; Latin, “stirps.”
5. Calliope is the epic muse — “sister” to the other eight.
6. Melpomene was the tragic muse.
7. The same is said of Griselda, in The Clerk’s Tale; though she was of tender years, “yet in the breast of her virginity there was inclos’d a sad and ripe corage”
8. The confusion which Chaucer makes between Cithaeron and Cythera, has already been remarked. See note 41 to the Knight’s Tale.
9. Balais: Bastard rubies; said to be so called from Balassa, the Asian country where they were found. Turkeis: turquoise stones.
10. Spenser, in his description of the House of Busirane, speaks of the sad distress into which Phoebus was plunged by Cupid, in revenge for the betrayal of “his mother’s wantonness, when she with Mars was meint [mingled] in joyfulness”