LIB. VIII.
We may suppose that our author had some embarrassment as regards the subject of his eighth book. It should properly have dealt with the seventh Deadly Sin and its various branches, that is, as the Mirour de l’Omme gives them, ‘Fornicacioun,’ ‘Stupre,’ ‘Avolterie,’ ‘Incest,’ ‘Foldelit.’ Nearly all of these subjects, however, have already been treated of more or less fully, either in the fifth book, where branches of Avarice are spoken of with reference to the case of love, or in the seventh, under the head of Chastity as a point of Policy. Even the author’s commendation of Virginity, which might well have been reserved for this place, and which would have been rather less incongruous at the end than in the middle of the shrift, has already been set forth in the fifth book. There remained only Incest, and of this unpromising subject he has made the best he could, first tracing out the gradual development of the moral (or rather the ecclesiastical) law with regard to it, and then making it an excuse for the Tale of Apollonius (or Appolinus) of Tyre, which extends over the larger half of the book. The last thousand lines or so are occupied with the conclusion of the whole poem.
36. upon his grace, that is, free for him to bestow on whom he would.
44. Raphael is not named in Genesis.
48. Metodre, that is, Methodius, in whose Revelationes it is written, ‘Sciendum namque est, exeuntes Adam et Evam de Paradiso virgines fuisse,’ so that ‘Into the world’ in l. 53 must mean from Paradise into the outer world.
62 ff. This is not found in Genesis, only ‘genuitque filios et filias,’ but Methodius says that the sisters of Cain and Abel were Calmana and Debora.
110. For the hiatus cp. Mirour, 12241,
‘De Isaäk auci je lis.’
158. ne yit religion. The seduction of one who was a professed member of a religious order was usually accounted to be incest: cp. Mirour, 9085 ff. and l. 175 below.
170. ‘I keep no such booth (or stall) at the fair,’ that is, ‘I do no such trade.’