tongue and the works of Italy's greatest bards, dead and living;
the reverential regard which he paid to the memory of great
poets, of which we have examples in "The House of Fame," and
at the close of "Troilus and Cressida" <4>; along with his own
testimony in the Prologue to The Clerk's Tale, we cannot fail to
construe that testimony as a declaration that the Tale was
actually told to Chaucer by the lips of Petrarch, in 1373, the
very year in which Petrarch translated it into Latin, from
Boccaccio's "Decameron."<5> Mr Bell notes the objection to
this interpretation, that the words are put into the mouth, not of
the poet, but of the Clerk; and meets it by the counter-
objection, that the Clerk, being a purely imaginary personage,
could not have learned the story at Padua from Petrarch -- and
therefore that Chaucer must have departed from the dramatic
assumption maintained in the rest of the dialogue. Instances
could be adduced from Chaucer's writings to show that such a
sudden "departure from the dramatic assumption" would not be
unexampled: witness the "aside" in The Wife of Bath's
Prologue, where, after the jolly Dame has asserted that "half so
boldly there can no man swear and lie as a woman can", the
poet hastens to interpose, in his own person, these two lines:

"I say not this by wives that be wise,
But if it be when they them misadvise."

And again, in the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women,"
from a description of the daisy --

"She is the clearness and the very light,
That in this darke world me guides and leads,"