translation was not made at second-hand; if not always easy it is
conscientious, and interpolated with numerous glosses and explanations
thought necessary by the translator. The metre of "The Former Life" he at
one time or another turned into verse of his own.

Perhaps the most interesting of the quotations made in Chaucer's poems
from Boethus occurs in his "Troilus and Cressid," one of the many medieval
versions of an episode engrafted by the lively fancy of an Anglo-Norman
trouvere upon the deathless, and in its literary variations incomparably
luxuriant, growth of the story of Troy. On Benoit de Sainte-Maure's poem
Guido de Colonna founded his Latin-prose romance; and this again, after
being reproduced in languages and by writers almost innumerable, served
Boccaccio as the foundation of his poem "Filostrato"--i.e. the victim of
love. All these works, together with Chaucer's "Troilus and Cressid,"
with Lydgate's "Troy-Book," with Henryson's "Testament of Cressid" (and in
a sense even with Shakespere's drama on the theme of Chaucer's poem), may
be said to belong to the second cycle of modern versions of the tale of
Troy divine. Already their earlier predecessors had gone far astray from
Homer, of whom they only know by hearsay, relying for their facts on late
Latin epitomes, which freely mutilated and perverted the Homeric narrative
in favour of the Trojans--the supposed ancestors of half the nations of
Europe. Accordingly, Chaucer, in a well-known passage in his "House of
Fame," regrets, with sublime coolness, how "one said that Homer" wrote
"lies,"

Feigning in his poetries
And was to Greekes favourable.
Therefore held he it but fable.

But the courtly poets of the romantic age of literature went a step