1676. The words of St. Paul, 2 Cor. xii. 4, have suggested numerous
accounts of revelations made to saints regarding heaven and hell. In Bede's
Eccl. History, bk. iii. c. 19, we are told how St. Furseus saw a vision of
hell; so also did St. Guthlac, as related in his life, cap. 5. A long
vision of purgatory is recounted in the Revelation to the Monk of Evesham,
ed. Arber; and another in the account of St. Patrick's Purgatory, in the
Lives of Saints, ed. Horstmann. Long descriptions of hell are common, as in
the Cursor Mundi, l. 23195, and Hampole's Pricke of Conscience, l. 6464.
But the particular story to which Chaucer here alludes is, probably, not
elsewhere extant.
1688. Possibly Chaucer was thinking of the wings of Lucifer, greater than
any sails, as described in Dante's Inferno, xxxiv. 48; whence also Milton
speaks of Satan's 'sail-broad vans,' P. L. ii. 927. A _carrik_ or _carrack_
is a large trading-ship, and we have here the earliest known example of the
use of the word in English; see _Carrack_ in the New Eng. Dictionary.
1690-1. Cf. Rom. of the Rose, 7577-8; in vol. i. p. 257.
1695. Line 2119 of the House of Fame is: 'Twenty thousand in a route'; here
we have the same line with the addition of _freres_. [331] Both lines are
cast in the same mould, both being deficient in the first foot. Thus the
scansion is: Twen | ty thou | sand, &c. In order to conceal this fact,
Tyrwhitt reads: '_A_ twenty thousand,' &c., against all authority; but
Wright, Bell, Morris, and Gilman all allow the line to stand as Chaucer
wrote it, and as it is here given. The black-letter editions do the same.
It is a very small matter that all the copies except E. have _on_ for _in_;
as the words are equivalent, I keep _in_ (as in E.), because _in_ is the
reading in the Hous of Fame.