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 sympathy is first aroused for
the heroine, whom, in the end, we cannot but condemn. In Boccaccio,
Cressid is fair and false--one of those fickle creatures with whom
Italian literature, and Boccaccio in particular, so largely deal, and
whose presentment merely repeats to us the old cynical half-truth as to
woman's weakness. The English poet, though he does not pretend that
his heroine was "religious" (i.e. a nun to whom earthly love is a sin),
endears her to us from the first; so much that "O the pity of it" seems
the hardest verdict we can ultimately pass upon her conduct. How, then,
i