234. Robert Grosteste’s reputation for learning in the sciences earned for him, as for his contemporary Roger Bacon, the character of a student of magic. In the metrical life of Grosteste by Robert of Bardney (Wharton, Anglia Sacra, i. 333) one chapter is ‘De aeneo capite quod Oxoniae fecit Grosthede ad dubia quaeque determinanda.’ This author says only that by some accident the head fell and was broken, and that its inventor thereupon abandoned the study of forbidden sciences.
Naudé in his Apologie pour les grands hommes soupçonnez de Magie classes ‘Robert de Lincolne’ and Albertus Magnus together as supposed makers of speaking images, but the former only on the authority of Gower, with whom he had been made acquainted by Selden.
242 f. That is, he lost all that he had done from the time when he first began to work; an inversion of clauses for the sake of the rhyme: cp. ii. 709 ff.
249. kept: more properly ‘kepe,’ but the infinitive is attracted into the form of the participle ‘wold,’ much as the participle of the mood auxiliary in modern German takes the form of the infinitive: see note on ii. 1799.
305. hadde I wist, cp. i. 1888, ii. 473. It is the exclamation of those who fall into evil by neglect of proper precaution. The same sentiment is expressed more fully in l. 899,
‘Ha, wolde god I hadde knowe!’
345. dar. This form stands as plural here and l. 350.
371 ff. The story of Pygmalion is from Ovid, Metam. x. 243-297.
377. ‘Being destined to the labours of love’; cp. note on iii. 143 (end).
415. how it were, i.e. ‘how so ever it were’: cp. l. 1848.