[Footnote 2: Boccaccio did not invent this stanza, which had been used in both French and Italian before his day, but he did constitute it the Italian form for heroic verse.]
[Footnote 3: Rymer misled Dryden. There is no trace of Provençal influence on Chaucer.]
[Footnote 4: The foundation layer of color in a painting.]
[Footnote 5: "Verses without content, melodious trifles."—Ars Poet. 322.]
[Footnote 6: Jeremy Collier, in his Short View of the Immortality and
Profaneness of the Stage, 1698.]
[Footnote 7: "Energetic, irascible, unyielding, vehement."—Horace, _Ars Poet._121.]
[Footnote 8: "Whithersoever the fates drag us to and fro, let us follow."—Virgil, Æneid, v. 709.]
[Footnote 9: The statements that follow as to Chaucer's sources are mostly not in accord with the results of modern scholarship.]
[Footnote 10: The plot of neither of these poems was original with
Chaucer.]
[Footnote 11: "Plenty has made me poor."—Meta. iii, 466.]