310. _Tewnes_, Tunis; vaguely put for some distant and wealthy town; see
ll. 1061-4, below. Its name was probably suggested by the preceding word
_entunes_, which required a rime. Gower mentions _Kaire_ (Cairo) just as
vaguely:--
'That me were lever her love winne
Than Kaire and al that is therinne'; Conf. Amant, ed. Pauli, ii. 57.
The sense is--'that certainly, even to gain Tunis, I would not have (done
other) than heard them sing.' Lange thinks these lines corrupt; but I
believe the idiom is correct.
323. As stained glass windows were then rare and expensive, it is worth
while observing that these gorgeous windows were not real ones, but only
seen in a dream. This passage is imitated in the late poem called the Court
of Love, st. 33, where we are told that 'The temple shone with windows al
of glasse,' and that in the glass were portrayed the stories of Dido and
Annelida. These windows, it may be observed, were equally imaginary.
328. The caesural pause comes after _Ector_, which might allow the
intrusion of the word _of_ before _king_. But Mr. Sweet omits _of_, and I
follow him. The words _of king_ are again inserted before _Lamedon_ in l.
329, being caught from l. 328 above.
_Lamedon_ is Laomedon, father of King Priam of Troy. _Ector_ is Chaucer's
spelling of Hector; Man of Lawes Tale, B 198. He here cites the usual
examples of love-stories, such as those of Medea and Jason, and Paris and
Helen. _Lavyne_ is Lavinia, the second wife of Æneas; Vergil, Æn. bk. vii;
Rom. Rose, 21087; cf. Ho. of Fame, 458. Observe his pronunciation of
_Médea_, as in Ho. of Fame, 401; Cant. Ta., B 72.
332. 'There is reason to believe that Chaucer copied these imageries from
the romance of _Guigemar_, one of the Lays of Marie de France; in which the
walls of a chamber are painted with Venus and the _Art of Love_ from Ovid.
Perhaps Chaucer might not look further than the temples of Boccaccio's
_Theseid_ for these ornaments'; Warton, Hist. E. Poetry, 1871, iii. 63. Cf.
Rom. of the Rose, ll. 139-146; see p. 99.
333. _Bothe text and glose_, i. e. both in the principal panels and in the
margin. He likens the walls to the page of a book, in which the _glose_, or
commentary, was often written in the margin. Mr. Sweet inserts _with_
before _text_, and changes _And_ into _Of_ in the next line; I do not think
the former change is necessary, but I adopt the latter.
334. It had all sorts of scenes from the Romance of the Rose on it. Chaucer
again mentions this Romance by name in his Merchant's Tale; C. T., E 2032;
and he tells us that he himself translated it; Prol. to Legend, 329. The
celebrated Roman de la Rose was begun by Guillaume de Lorris, who wrote ll.
1-4070, and completed about forty years afterwards (in a very different and
much more satirical style) by Jean de Meung (or Meun), surnamed (like his
father) Clopinel, i. e. the Cripple, who wrote ll. 4071-22074; it was
finished about the year 1305. The story is that of a young man who
succeeded in plucking a rose in a walled garden, after overcoming
extraordinary difficulties; allegorically, it means that he succeeded in
obtaining the object of his love. See further above, pp. 16-19.
The E. version is invariably called the Romaunt of the Rose, and we find
the title Rommant de la Rose in the original, l. 20082; cf. our
_romant-ic_. But Burguy explains that _romant_ is a false form, due to
confusion with words rightly ending in _-ant_. The right O. F. form is
_romans_, originally an adverb; from the phrase _parler romans_, i. e.
loqui Romanice. In the Six-text edition of the Cant. Tales, E 2032, four
MSS. have _romance_, one has _romans_, and one _romauns_.
For examples of walls or ceilings being painted with various subjects, see
Warton's Hist. of E. Poetry, ed. Hazlitt, ii. 131, 275; iii. 63.
340. The first accent is on _Blew_, not on _bright_. Cf. Rom. de la Rose,
124, 125 (see p. 98, above):--
'Clere et serie et bele estoit
La matinee, et atrempee.'
343. _Ne in_ is to be read as _Nin_; we find it written _nin_ in the
Squieres Tale, F 35. See l. 694.