"He hadde ymade ful mony a mariage Of yongè women, at his owen coste;"
and Mister Horne brazen-facedly,
"Full many a marriage had he brought to bear, For women young, and paid the cost with sport."
O fie, Mister Horne! To hide our blushes, will no maiden for a moment lend us her fan? We cover our face with our hands.—Of this same Frere, Mr Horne, in his introduction, when exposing the faults of another translator, says that "Chaucer shows us the quaint begging rogue playing his harp among a crowd of admiring auditors, and turning up his eyes with an attempted expression of religious enthusiasm;" but Chaucer does no such thing, nor was the Frere given to any such practice.
Of the Clerk of Oxenford, Chaucer says, he "loked holwe, and thereto soberly." Mr Horne needlessly adds "ill-fed." Chaucer says—
"Ful threadbare was his overest courtepy."
Mr Horne modernizes it into—
"His uppermost short cloak was a bare thread."
Why exaggerate so? Chaucer says—
"But all that he might of his frendes hente On bokès and on lerning he it spente."