1021. Homward, i.e. going towards home: cp. 2451.
1030 f. Hist. Troiana, n 4, ‘qui necesse habebant per confinia regni sui transire.’
1036. it sihe, ‘might see it.’
1049. ten or twelve. Guido says two hundred. Benoît does not specify the number of ships, but says that ten thousand men were lost. Gower has judiciously reduced the number.
1063. Cp. Hist. Troiana, n 4 vo, ‘fugiunt et se immittunt in pelagus spaciosum.’
1065. ‘what’ for ‘war,’ which appears in the unrevised form of the first recension, must be an error of the original scribe: on the other hand, ‘tyme’ for ‘dai’ proceeded no doubt originally from the author and was altered in order to make the verse run more smoothly.
Latin Verses. iv. 1. et sit spiritus eius Naribus: a reference to Isaiah ii. 22, ‘Quiescite ergo ab homine, cuius spiritus in naribus eius est.’ The same passage is quoted in Mirour, 4754, and it is evident there that the ‘breath in the nostrils’ was understood by our author to stand for fury of anger.
1113. war hem wel, ‘let them beware.’
1158. The contest in the heart between Wit and Reason on the one hand and Will and Hope on the other is quite in the style of the Roman de la Rose, where Reason and the Lover have an endless controversy (2983 ff.). Though the agencies are clearly personified here, the author has not assigned capital letters to their names.
1166. out of retenue, ‘out of my service.’