the poet, in the very next lines, slides into an address to his lady:

"The heart within my sorrowful heart you dreads
And loves so sore, that ye be, verily,
The mistress of my wit, and nothing I," &c.

When, therefore, the Clerk of Oxford is made to say that he will
tell a tale --

"The which that I
Learn'd at Padova of a worthy clerk,
As proved by his wordes and his werk.
He is now dead, and nailed in his chest,
I pray to God to give his soul good rest.
Francis Petrarc', the laureate poete,
Highte this clerk, whose rhetoric so sweet
Illumin'd all Itaile of poetry. . . .
But forth to tellen of this worthy man,
That taughte me this tale, as I began." . . .

we may without violent effort believe that Chaucer speaks in his
own person, though dramatically the words are on the Clerk's
lips. And the belief is not impaired by the sorrowful way in
which the Clerk lingers on Petrarch's death -- which would be
less intelligible if the fictitious narrator had only read the story
in the Latin translation, than if we suppose the news of
Petrarch's death at Arqua in July 1374 to have closely followed
Chaucer to England, and to have cruelly and irresistibly mingled
itself with our poet's personal recollections of his great Italian