further, and added a mediaeval colouring all their own. One converts the
Sibyl into a nun, and makes her admonish Aeneas to tell his beads.
Another--it is Chaucer's successor Lydgate--introduces Priam's sons
exercising their bodies in tournaments and their minds in the glorious
play of chess, and causes the memory of Hector to be consecrated by the
foundation of a chantry of priests who are to pray for the repose of his
soul. A third finally condemns the erring Cressid to be stricken with
leprosy, and to wander about with cup and clapper, like the unhappy lepers
in the great cities of the Middle Ages. Everything, in short, is
transfused by the spirit of the adapters' own times; and so far are these
writers from any weakly sense of anachronism in describing Troy as if it
were a moated and turreted city of the later Middle Ages, that they are
only careful now and then to protest their own truthfulness when anything
in their narrative seems UNLIKE the days in which they write.

But Chaucer, though his poem is, to start with, only an English
reproduction of an Italian version of a Latin translation of a French
poem, and though in most respects it shares the characteristic features of
the body of poetic fiction to which it belongs, is far from being a mere
translator. Apart from several remarkable reminiscences introduced by
Chaucer from Dante, as well as from the irrepressible "Romaunt of the
Rose," he has changed his original in points which are not mere matters of
detail or questions of convenience. In accordance with the essentially
dramatic bent of his own genius, some of these changes have reference to
the aspect of the characters and the conduct of the plot, as well as to
the whole spirit of the conception of the poem. Cressid (who, by the way,
is a widow at the outset--whether she had children or not, Chaucer nowhere
found stated, and therefore leaves undecided) may at first sight strike
the reader as a less consistent character in Chaucer than in Boccaccio.
But there is true art in the way in which, in the English poem, our