Dusked his eyen two, and failled his breth.
But on his ladie yet cast he his eye;
His laste word was; Mercy, Emelie!"
The Knightes Tale, 2301.
Troilus and Creseide seems to have been translated from the Filostrato of Boccaccio, when
Chaucer was a young man, as we are informed by Dan John Lydgate in the Prologue to his Translation of Boccaccio's Fall of Princes, where he speaks of his "Maister Chaucer" as the "chefe poete of Bretayne," and tells us that—
"In youthe he made a translacion
Of a boke which called is Trophe,
In Lumbard tongue, as men may rede and se,
And in our vulgar, long or that he deyde