THE PALIS OF HONOURE: FOOTNOTES

1 Which greenness (the) branches poured upon the garden paths

2 Diverting the mists with [a] smoky incense

3 I did not know whether it were vision or illusion

4 Preparing themselves with early morning worship

5 My dazed head, which lack of brain caused to wander

6 Preparing myself to go and not wishing to tarry longer

7 But instead, rocky knolls parched by northern winds

8 Burnt, barren, without blossoms or leaves

9 In which Nature sustained no (living) thing

10 According to traditional practices, and did not go astray

11 They expressed their high wisdom, and did not whisper at all

12 In a suitable manner, at which the forest echoed

13 Then after her, dressed in grain-dyed violet clothes,

14 Who seemed discreet members of her council

15 And stand at a distance, where better folk are turned away

16 But they ripped their lord apart - did not recognize him who fed them

17 Most dense and filthy contaminated clouds rattled past

18 The which I took care to hear with attentiveness

19 Resounding harmoniously across the entire sky

20 In the world here below since Adam was created

21 The crystal eyes of that divine person so vanquish

22 500-01: Extemporized part-singing, notated song, melodic accompaniment, singing a third part,

23 Imposing silence (forbidding me) to ask again for mercy

24 In subtle turns of phrase, sophisticated devices of rhetoric

25 Chatterers would speak ill of it and show no hesitation (to)

26 I dared not attempt [it]; not for the whole world

27 You may perceive your wretched world to be in now

28 Who perished in the tumult of the heaving waves

29 So starving, drenched, exhausted (checkmated), overcome with toil, and weak

30 Wall-recess(es), indented mouldings, projecting stone brace(s), and battlements

31 [I saw] the three young men (Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego) sent into the furnace

32 Involved in the treacherous instability of the world

33 Chasing the birds, in danger of death, into the water

34 Enclosing them according to their flocks and species

35 And, during their dive underwater, I saw some (of the birds) treated harshly

36 But they couldn't find any foothold because of the slipperiness (of that wall)

37 Thus urging themselves forward to climb [who] once were bold [and]

38 Are royal confessors and attendants of the royal bedchamber

39 Who do not wish to commit a breach of law against anyone

40 Are administrators of outlying regions and buyers of provisions for the king

41 Is named Truth, (who) never injured a loyal man

42 But do not inspect too closely lest you go insane

43 I could hardly glance upon them because of their brilliance

44 With solid gold, from which the purity was diffused

45 But of what substance the walls were made I did not know

46 Trestles, seats, and benches were, polished smooth

47 Once they are gone, just see who waits on them.

48 When you have had a breather and [are] better conditioned

49 2120-21: Without which, as is just, no worthy person can continue;

50 That, sweetly, every spirit (person) inclines both head and feet (i.e., bows and kneels)

51 That person achieves absolutely nothing who thoughtlessly abandons you

52 Be pleased to rid me quickly of sorrow in order that I may write

53 To come into the open, make sure you do not put yourself forward

THE PALIS OF HONOURE: NOTES

1 Concluding his tale of Memnon's death at Troy, Ovid mentions the tears Aurora the dawn-goddess sheds each morning in memory of her son (Metamorphoses 13.621-22); the image is conventional in English and Scots courtly verse (Lydgate, Troy Book 3.2745-58; Dunbar, Goldyn Targe 16).

1-18 Douglas's opening might be translated as follows: "When the pale Aurora with her mournful face wrapped her sable-fringed russet cloak with divine ceremoniousness around the soft bed and worthy tapestry of Flora, kindly queen of flowers in May, I arose to perform my customary ritual, and entered an enclosed garden [which was] illuminated by the sun [so that it was] as lovely as Paradise, and [by] delightful boughs in [their] variety of blossoms, so skilfully had Dame Flora embroidered her heavenly bed (which was sprinkled with many a cluster of rubies, topazes, pearls, and emeralds, soaked in balmy dew and suitably moist), until warm vapors (very fresh and amply supplied, sweet-smelling, of a most fragrant odor) [were] distilling the silver droplets upon the daisies, the greenness of which vapors the branches poured upon the garden paths, chasing away nighttime mists with a smoky incense." The subject phrase "hot vapors" lacks a finite verb phrase, and the antecedent for "which" (Quhilk, 17) is unclear. The loose syntax of this opening deserves comparison with the tighter beginning to Chaucer's General Prologue (Whan . . . Whan . . . Than; Canterbury Tales 1.1-18), an enticing but inimitable model for ambitious fifteenth-century poets (Pearsall 58-59).

2 The cloak of the dawn-goddess Aurora is both rustic and courtly: made of the coarse reddish-brown wool of peasant clothing, it is nevertheless fringed with costly black fur. This allusion to the colors in the dawn sky may also refer to the mixing of rustic and courtly in the poem as a whole.

6 According to Bartholomaeus Anglicus, "In May woodis wexith grene, medis springith and florischith and wel nyghe alle thingis that beth alyve beth imeved to joye and to love" (On the Properties of Things 1.531 [9.13]); Chaucer's Arcite goes into the woods alone at dawn "to doon his observaunce to May," and there he makes "a gerland of the greves, / Were it of wodebynde or hawethorn leves," and sings a song to May (The Knight's Tale, CT 1.1499-512).

7 This may simply be a pleasant garden; a plesance, however, is a walled garden (like the gardens in Le Roman de la Rose or The Parliament of Fowls), into which one enters, as Douglas's narrator says he did.

8 Among the marginal emendations written into the National Library of Scotland's black-letter copy (E) is dilectabil, at this line; the late-sixteenth- or early-seventeenth-century writer of these emendations perceived a flaw in the repetition of the rhyme-word amyable.

11 Along with the pun on bed (see also line 4), there is one on set, being the name for a cluster of either jewels or buds.

16 In a May scene, Chaucer refers to "silver dropes hangynge on the leves" (The Knight's Tale, CT 1.1496).

17-18 The verdour being poured out is assumed to be related to the vapours hote mentioned before (14); like incense driving away impure thoughts in a church, it drives away the noxious mists of the passing night.

20 Lydgate spoke of a flourishing garden as Nature's tapestry in The Complaint of the Black Knight (50-52).

21-24 Birdsong is commonly to be heard in the pleasant place (Curtius 195, 197); following Chaucer (The Parliament of Fowls 491-93), English and Scots courtly poets tend to exaggerate the effects of this sound (Complaint of the Black Knight, 45-46; Goldyn Targe 25; Pearsall 90).

25 L's reading eccon is also found in D; however, it is not a spelling found elsewhere and has been regarded as an error stemming from the text from which both L and D are derived. Conceivably the -n should be understood as a plural. E reads Echo.

30 Ovid names the four horses of the Sun, Eous being the red horse of dawn (Metamorphoses 2.153-54); Henryson uses a different source for his description of the four horses (Testament of Cresseid 211-16).

32 An echo of Ovid's description of the chariot of the Sun, during the story of Phaethon ("gold was the axle, gold the shaft, and gold was the entire circle of each wheel"; Metamorphoses 2.107-08).

49-52 These three deities are allegories for wind, frost, and rain (or flood; see Dunbar's Thrissil and the Rois [May 1502 or 1503], 64-66); Saturn is memorably associated with wintry weather in Henryson's Testament of Cresseid (155-68).

53 Beryl is proverbially associated with clarity and brightness (Whiting B263).

63 Hearing an authoritative voice (sometimes taken to be a bird's) is a convention in poems about a visit to the pleasant place (e.g., Lydgate's Seying of the Nightingale; Henryson's "Praise of Age"; Dunbar's "The Merle and the Nichtingall," "All erdly joy returnis in pane").

65 Calling May the maternal month is a Chaucerism (Troilus and Criseyde 2.50; Court of Sapience 1269).

89 The dreamer looks up to see something new three more times (784, 1405-06, 1934).

105 Following Aristotle, Bartholomaeus describes several types of impressiouns, actually meteorites, but which were believed to be generated in the atmos-phere at various altitudes by the ignition of hot dry air: one of these, ignis longus, is called "a dragoun spoutynge fire" (On the Properties of Things 1.569-70 [11.2]).

108 "Feeble" is a word the dreamer often uses of himself (100, 103, 108, 770, 970, 1166, 2032; Curtius 83).

113-17 According to Bartholomaeus, the "sensible soul" receives sense impressions, has the source of its vital power in the heart, and is the generator of sleep (On the Properties of Things 1.98-100 [3.9-12]); it would seem to be this aspect of soul that is affected by the sudden flash of light; Bartholomaeus also discusses those stimuli that cause the blood to rush to the heart to preserve the heat of the body (fear, infection, injury, air pollution, great cold), "whanne the spirit vitales fleth his contray and closith himself in the innere parties of the herte" (106).

127-35 See The House of Fame 523-28, where Chaucer celebrates his feeble brain, taking off on Dante, Inferno 2.8-9. By the later fifteenth century such disclaimers are commonplace.

136-53 Chaucer describes a dream-desert in The House of Fame (482-91); a closer parallel to Douglas's wasteland is Chaucer's description of the noisy, barren forest surrounding the temple of Mars (The Knight's Tale, CT 1.1975-80); Douglas may also be drawing on the sudden transformation of the forest from pleasant to hellish place that is part of the tradition of the encounter between the Three Living and the Three Dead (Tristram 165).

142 B records A. J. Aitken's emendation barrane for L and E's bare raif, the n having plausibly been mistaken for u, with raif an alternate spelling for raue.

146 The source for the image of yelling fish is "the medieval list of the Signs of Doomsday attributed to St. Jerome and included in Peter Comestor's Historia Scholastica" (Nitecki 18-19).

163-92 The ten-line stanza here is the one Henryson uses for the lament of Orpheus (134-83), and the one used in the mid-fifteenth-century Scots translation of a French complaint on the death of Margaret, daughter of James I of Scotland and wife of the Dauphin (Liber Pluscardensis 1.382-88); see also the "ballet of inconstant love" later in the poem (607-36).

166 Marginal note in L: A discription of the inconstance of fortune.

174-81 Antithesis is a rhetorical figure commonly used to express the variability of Fortune (and of Venus: see lines 601-03; Utley 33; Pearsall 113); another figure employed here (and frequently elsewhere in the poem) is anaphora, the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of consecutive clauses.

199-300 Gower's Princess Rosiphilee likewise uses a tree as a hiding place from which to watch a procession of a courtly retinue (of Venus); she also stops someone who has failed to obey the laws of that court (Confessio Amantis 4.1292-1434).

202 Marginal note in L: The quen of sapyence wyth hyr court.

215 Compare Henryson's goldin listis [edgings] gilt on everie gair of Jupiter's gown (Testament of Cresseid 179).

231 Marginal note in L: Craftye Synone and false Architefel; classical and biblical personages are frequently linked in the poem (e.g., 250-51, 338-40, 1453-57).

232 Ahithophel hanged himself after his counsel was rejected (2 Samuel 17:23); see also Confessio Amantis 2.3089-94.

246 Biblical heroines: the Apocryphal Book of Judith 8-16; and, for Jael, Judges 4. Chaucer describes Judith's assassination of Holofernes (The Monk's Tale, CT 7.2551-74); drawn from antifeminist passages in the Fall of Princes; the Lydgatian "Examples against Women" presents Judith as a treacherous woman (Utley 269-70); elsewhere, she is a type of the Virgin Mary (Woolf 130, 279). See Heroic Women from the Old Testament in Middle English Verse, ed. Russell A. Peck (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), pp. 109-53, for a fifteenth-century Middle English version of the Judith story, which praises her firm intelligence and strength of character.

251 Marginal note in L: Wyse and lerned men.

253 Porphyry, follower of the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus; Parmenides, Presocratic Greek philosopher, founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy.

254 Melissus, follower of Parmenides.

255 Shadrach, companion of Daniel and renowned for learning (Daniel 1:4); Secundus, philosopher associated with the Emperor Hadrian; Solinus, late Roman natural historian.

257 Nectanabus, Egyptian magician and reputed father of Alexander the Great; his story is presented at length in Gower's Confessio Amantis 6.1789-2366. Hermes Trismegistus, a shadowy figure in Neoplatonist tradition, is the reputed originator of alchemy; see Confessio Amantis 4.2606-07 and 7.1476-92.

258 Galen, influential Greek physician; Averroes, Arabic commentator on Aristotle.

259 Enoch and his grandson Lamech, fathers of Methuselah and Noah respectively (Genesis 5:18-19, 21-24; 5:25-31), the former of whom acquired a reputation as an astrologer during the Middle Ages; Diogenes, the Cynic philosopher (see Confessio Amantis 3.1201-1311).

261 Flavius Josephus, Jewish leader and historian of the Jewish revolt against Rome (AD 66-70).

262 Melchizedek, priest-king and ally of Abraham (Genesis 14:18-20).

276 Marginal note in L: Architefel confessis hys owne craftenes deceyt and abused wit. Ahithophel conspired with Absolom, "And the counsel of Ahithophel . . . was as if a man had enquired at the oracle of God" (2 Samuel 16:20-23); Gower refers to Ahithophel as an example of envy (Confessio Amantis 2.3089-94).

283 Virgil has Aeneas recount the strategems by which Sinon deceived the Trojans (Aeneid II.57-198).

299 Referring to himself as elrych ("elvish"), the poet recalls the Host's jesting description of the pilgrim Chaucer as "elvyssh by his contenaunce" (CT VII.703).

308 Marginal note in L: Feare.

316-27 Diana's transformation of Actaeon into a hart (Metamorphoses 3.131-257; compare the depiction of this event in Chaucer's Temple of Diana, The Knight's Tale, CT I.2065-68); and Gower's Confessio Amantis 1.333-82.

327 This line is an example of Douglas's concise style: note the asyndeton (omission of a grammatically integral word, here a conjunction between lord and mysknew), and the grim pun on batit (Acteon used to feed his dogs as their master; now he feeds them as their prey); for another example of this style, see line 1680.

329 This is the company to which Cresseid bequeaths her soul in Henryson's Testament of Cresseid (587-88).

330 The elephant is an emblem of chastity: "Elephantes hateth the werk of leccherye but oonliche to gendre offsprynge" (On the Properties of Things 2.1196 [18.45]).

338 Judges 11.29-40: the Israelite soldier Jephthah vowed to sacrifice to God "whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me" on his victorious return from battle; his daughter was first to meet him, and he "did with her according to his vow" (see also Confessio Amantis 4.1505-95 and the Middle English version of the Jephthah story in Heroic Women from the Old Testament, ed. Peck).

340 Polixene, daughter of Priam of Troy, sacrificed at Achilles' tomb (Metamorphoses 13.447-82). Medieval tradition has Achilles futilely in love with her (Confessio Amantis 4.1693-1701; 5.7591-96; 8.2590-96.)

341 Penthesileia, queen of the Amazons, who, for love of Hector, fought at Troy, was killed in battle by Pyrrhus (Troy Book 4.3760-4436 and Confessio Amantis 4.2135-47; 5.2547-51; 8.2525-27).

342 Iphigenia was offered in sacrifice by her father Agamemnon to Diana (Metamorphoses 12.26-39); Virginius killed his daughter to prevent her being raped (Livy, History 3.44-48; Roman de la Rose 5589-5658; Chaucer, The Physician's Tale; Confessio Amantis 7.5131-5306).

346-54 According to Bartholomaeus, "deserte is untiliede and ful of thornes and pricchinge busshes, place of crepying wormes and venymouse bestes and of wylde bestes, and it is the home of flemyd men and of theves, londe of firste and of drynesse, londe of brennynge and disease, londe of wastynge and of grysnesse, londe of mysgoynge and of errynge" (On the Properties of Things 2.721 [14.51]).

359 This is the planet Venus, which appears in the northeast sky before sunrise during late spring and early summer; Taurus (April 20 to May 20) is an astrological house of Venus: "Venus is lord therof by day and the mone by nyght, and Mars partiner with hem" (On the Properties of Things 1.466 [8.10]).

360-61 B suggests that the order of these lines as given in L and E be reversed, in order that the relative clause referring to hearing depend on a main clause referring to a sound; this reversal would not affect rhyme scheme. Her suggested emendation has been adopted here.

362 nowmer. Number refers to ratios and proportions as well as measure; thus both rhythm and harmony.

364-81 Compare the discourse of Chaucer's Eagle on the properties of sound (The House of Fame 765-852).

365-66 Earth is "most passible of elementz . . . . [B]ecause of medlyng of firy and aery parties the erthe is in som parties thynne, holy, and dym and spongy" (On the Properties of Things 2.692-93 [14.2]).

373 According to Chaucer's Eagle, "Soun is noght but eyr ybroken" (The House of Fame 765).

394 Marginal note in L: A sorwful harte can not be mery.

403 Marginal note in L: Hevinlye harmonye.

418-35 This set-piece of ekphrasis demonstrates the poet's familiarity with classical models of description, and especially with Ovid's ornate description of the Palace of the Sun (Metamorphoses 2.106-10); Douglas imitates lines from this description elsewhere (32, 1837-63; Norton-Smith 243-46). Marginal note in L designates: Goodly apparell.

436 L: thair; E: thir. Thair is probably a variant of the demonstrative thir ("these"), rather than the possessive pronoun ("their").

444 In ascending order, the angelic hierarchies are (1) Angels, Archangels, and Virtues; (2) Powers, Principalities, and Dominations; and (3) Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim (On the Properties of Things 1.68-84 [2.7-18]); the comparison with angels' song is proverbial (Whiting A128).

476-80 Compare Chaucer's more idealized description of the God of Love, who, "al be that men seyn that blynd ys he, / Algate me thoghte that he myghte se" (The Legend of Good Women F prologue 237-38); by emphasizing Cupid's blindness, Douglas depicts him as the "personification of illicit sensuality" (Panofsky 121).

491 Marginal note in L: Musyke.

492-501 Douglas's tour de force of musical technology bespeaks the sophistication of musical training and appreciation in Scottish court society in the early sixteenth century. A generation earlier, Henryson also refers to the music of the spheres by means of a similarly abstruse list of specialized musical terms, including tonys proportionate, duplar, triplar, diatesseron, and dyapason (Orpheus, 226-34; compare Court of Sapience 2070-74).

502-05 According to Gower, the retinue of Venus is announced by "a soun / Of bombard and of clarion / With cornemuse and Schallemale" (Confessio Amantis 8.2481-83; compare Court of Sapience 2091-95). But John Lydgate, in Reson and Sensualyte 5564-5612, offers the first extended catalogue of instruments that accompany the entourage of Cupid, Dame Beauty, and their court - harpys, fythels, rotys, lutys, rubibis, geterns, organys, cytolys, monocordys (5583), trumpes, trumpetes, shallys, doucetes, floutys, etc., with all their "proporsiouns" and "verray hevenly son . . . so hevenly and celestiall" (5601, 5606). See also The Buke of the Howlat, where Holland provides a long list of musical instruments, including psaltery, sytholis, croude (a kind of fiddle, with two to six strings, a bow and, later, a finger board, played at the shoulder, or, depending on the size, across the knees), monycordis (a forerunner of the clavichord, with strings and bridges, at first bowed, but later keyed), tympane, lute, organis, claryonis (a kind of trumpet, at first straight, later folded), and portativis (a portable organ) (757-67). See also The Squire of Low Degree (1069-79), for another catalogue of instruments.

507 B's note on this puzzling line is useful: "Fractionis perhaps refers to what Wyclif calls `a smale brekynge' (English Works, ed. F. D. Matthew, EETS, 1880, page 191), i.e., a form of singing in which a single long note in plain chant was represented by two or more notes in the accompanying parts; rest may have its musical sense of `an interval of silence'; clois compell may perhaps be literally `drive close together.' A tentative translation is: `[I heard] short notes divided by intervals of silence or sung rapidly in close succession"' (p. 181).

509-10 1 Samuel 16:14-23.

511-12 Ovid refers to Jupiter's mortal son Amphion raising the walls of Thebes by playing his lyre (Metamorphoses 6.180). See Chaucer's Manciple's Tale IX.116-18.

513 Possibly alluding to Orpheus.

517-18 A comically overstated admission of ignorance, recalling Henryson's confessions of lack of musical expertise (Orpheus 240-42).

518 The cuckoo is a proverbially unmusical bird (Whiting A174).

523 The "music of the spheres" consists of the sounds supposed to be generated by the harmonious revolutions of the planets and stars; according to Bartolomaeus, the outermost sphere in motion (the primum mobile; see line 1840 note) "is cause affectif of generacioun and of lyvynge; and ravyschith and drawith to hitsilf contrarye thinges, for by violence of his mevinge he drawith aftir him the planetis, that metith therwith. And passith forth with armonye and acorde; for, as Aristotel seith, . . . of ordinate meovynge of the spere and of contarye metinge of planetes in the worlde cometh armonye and acorde" (On the Properties of Things 1.458 [8.6]; see Henryson, Orpheus, 220-22).

525 The Welsh bard known as Glasgerion; compare The House of Fame 1208, and Child Ballad 67.

534 of. L reads or brounvert; E: ovirbrouderit. E makes easier sense ("embroidered"); it is possible that L's reading or brounvert is the preferable one, however, the line then reading "Whose poorest clothing was (made of) silks or dark-green [cloth]." Combinations of brown with other terms of color simply indicated that the color thus modified was especially dark (OED brown, a.1); and often terms of color could be used by themselves as names of types of cloth (DOST broun, n.2; a.1).

550 Marginal note in L: Mars.

559-61 On the adulterous love of Mars for Venus, see Metamorphoses 4.171-89. See also Chaucer's Complaint of Mars.

562-91 Similar catalogues of famous lovers appear in The House of Fame 388-426, The Legend of Good Women F prologue 249-68, CT 2.57-76, and Confessio Amantis 8.2500-2656.

562-63 Marginal note in L: Lovers. The two noble kinsmen Palamon and Arcite, rivals in love for Emily, sister-in-law of Theseus, Duke of Athens; characters in Chaucer's Knight's Tale.

564 This emphasis on Aeneas' falseness is Chaucerian (The Legend of Good Women 1236, 1265-76, 1285-86, 1325-31; The House of Fame 255-92; following Aeneid 2 and Ovid's Heroides 7); compare Douglas's later skepticism on this account: Chaucer "set on Virgill and Eneas this wyte, / For he was evir (God wait) all womanis frend" (Eneados 1.prologue 448-49). See also Confessio Amantis 4.77-137, where faithless Aeneas is accused of slowthe.

565 See Chaucer's Troilus and Crisyede, of course, but also Gower's Confessio Amantis 2.2456-58; 4.2795-97; 5.7597-7602; and 8.2531-35.

566 While Douglas could have had access through various sources to the story of Helen's abduction to Troy by Paris, this reference appears in a passage relying heavily on Ovid's "Heroines" (Heroides), the sixteenth of which is a letter from Paris to Helen, and the seventeenth, Helen's reply.

567 Lucrece, raped by Lucius Tarquinius, commits suicide (The Legend of Good Women 1680-1885; Confessio Amantis 7.4754-5130; 8.2632-39; Ovid, Fasti 2.685-852); the letter of Penelope to her long-lost husband Ulysses is the first of Ovid's Heroides; see Confessio Amantis 4.147-233 and 8.2621-31.

568 The tale of these ill-starred lovers is told by Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.55-166), followed by Gower (Confessio Amantis 3.1374-1494) and Chaucer (The Legend of Good Women 706-923).

569 Procne's husband raped and mutilated her sister Philomela (Metamorphoses 6.426-674; Confessio Amantis 5.5551-6074; The Legend of Good Women 2228-393).

570 King David loved Bathsheba, wife of his soldier Uriah, and successfully conspired to have Uriah killed in battle in order to marry her (2 Samuel 11:2-27). See Confessio Amantis 8.2689-90.

571 Alcione's drowned husband Ceyx appeared to her in a dream (Metamorphoses 11.410-748; Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess 62-217); and Confessio Amantis 4.2927-3123; 8.2647-56.

572-73 While it is possible that Douglas had read a Latin translation of Book I of Homer's Iliad, he would have had easier access to the story of Achilles' anger over Agamemnon's appropriation of Briseis through Ovid's many allusions to it (Heroides 3; Amores 1.9.33, 2.8.11-14; Ars Amatoriae 2.399-406; Remedia Amoris 467-84, 777-84).

574 Phyllis, a princess of Thrace, fell in love with the Athenian prince Demophon (on his way back from Troy) and married him; feigning a desire to visit his mother, he deserted her, and she cursed him, having given him a love-token to open if away longer than a year; he did so, went mad, and died on his own sword. For Phyllis' letter, see Ovid, Heroides 2 (also Remedia Amoris 591-604) and The Legend of Good Women 2394-2561; for another version of the story (in which Phyllis, having committed suicide, is transformed into a filbert tree), see Confessio Amantis 4.731-878).

575 Medea, a sorceress and princess of Colchis, fell in love with Jason and helped him steal the Golden Fleece; returning with Jason to Greece, she restored his father's youth and murdered his enemy Pelias, but then went into exile (Metamorphoses 7.1-403; Confessio Amantis 5.3368-4222; and The Legend of Good Women 1580-1679).

576 An English translation of this French prose romance, Paris and Vienne, was printed by William Caxton in 1485.

577 Having been shown how to get through the Labyrinth by Ariadne, Theseus abducted her from Crete and then abandoned her on the island of Naxos (Metamorphoses 8.168-82; Heroides 10, The Legend of Good Women 1886-2227, Confessio Amantis 5.5231-5495); Theseus later married another Cretan princess, Phaedra, who fell in love with his son by the Amazon queen Antiope (Heroides 4); Gower includes Theseus among the retinue of Venus: "thogh he were untrewe / To love, as alle wommen knewe, / Yit was he there natheles / With Phedra, whom to love he ches" (Confessio Amantis 8.2511-14).

578 There are three English versions of the thirteenth-century romance Ipomadon (by Hue de Rotelande), in which the ill-dressed hero pretends to prefer hunting to jousting, only to win in disguise at the tournament, gaining the hand of a princess when he is recognized.

579 Ahasuerus loved Esther (Esther 2:17). Susannah was falsely accused of adultery (Daniel, apocryphal chapter 13; see also The Pistel of Swete Susan in Heroic Women from the Old Testament, ed. Peck).

580 Delilah, wife and betrayer of Samson (Judges 16.4-20; The Monk's Tale, CT 7.2063-70; Confessio Amantis 8.2701-04).

581 Deianira, neglected wife and unintentional murderer of Hercules (Metamorphoses 9.1-158; Heroides 9; The Monk's Tale, CT 7.2119-26; Confessio Amantis 2.2145-2307; 8.2559-62).

582 Biblis, cursed lover of her twin brother (Metamorphoses 9.454-668); Absalom, handsome, rebellious son of David, who likewise was incestuous (2 Samuel 13:1-18.33; Confessio Amantis 8.216-22.)

583 After spending two years with her, Hypsipyle's lover Jason departed in search of the Golden Fleece and then fell in love with Medea (Heroides 6, The Legend of Good Women 1368-1679; Lydgate, Siege of Thebes 3188-92); Scylla, lover of her father's enemy, Minos (Metamorphoses 8.1-150).

584 Tristram, knight at courts of Kings Arthur and Mark, and lover of Mark's wife Iseult (Confessio Amantis 6.471-76, 8.2500-01); Elkanah and Hannah, parents of the prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 1-2).

585 Chaucer's legend of Cleopatra (The Legend of Good Women 580-705), in which the Egyptian queen jumps into a snake-pit declaring her love for Mark Antony, would have been available to Douglas (Lydgate follows Chaucer in his version: Fall of Princes 6.3620-68). See also Confessio Amantis 8.2571-77.

586 Hercules abducted Iole, thereby arousing the jealousy of Deianira (see line 581 note); having died to save her husband, Alcestis was rescued from Hades by Hercules (Confessio Amantis 7.1917-43, 8.2640-46), and she is Chaucer's advocate in the Court of Love (The Legend of Good Women, G prologue 179, 317-431; F prologue 341-441, 510-16); Ixion probably refers to Hesione (rescued by Hercules from a sea-monster; Metamorphoses 11.211-17), her name being spelled Exiona in line 1598.

587 Griselde, the heroine of Chaucer's Clerk's Tale.

588 Compare Metamorphoses 3.339-510, where Narcissus simply pines away; in Confessio Amantis 1.2340-42, he dashes his head against a stone after beholding a lovely lady in the water, for whom he yearns.

589-91 Genesis 29.

592-94 The refinement of costume and decay of morals among women is a common antifeminist topic (Utley 60; Pearsall 118-19, 134-35; compare Henryson's more positive approach in "The Garmont of Gud Ladies," and Dunbar's more subtly ironic "Thir ladyis fair that in the Court ar kend," 40-48); see also the self-directed antifeminism of Venus, in lines 981-87.

607 Marginal note in L: A ballet of inconstant love.

613 The word involupit is peculiar to Douglas (e.g., Eneados IV.ii.44 and VII.ii.67, the only two citations of the word in DOST); Copland provides an easier reading, involvit, which I emend in favor of the more authentic term.

625 In Richard Holland's Buke of the Howlat, the complaining owl likewise calls himself a bysyn, a bad example, a portent (107, 959); Venus later calls the dreamer "that bysnyng schrew" (943).

627-36 The "Wo worth" anaphora was a commonplace of courtly complaint, originating with Troilus and Criseyde 2.344-47. Perhaps the best translation is "Alas." "Woe to" or "Woe befall" or "Woe become" hint at the untranslatability of the idiom.

630 Marginal note in L: He curseth the worlds felycite, fortune and al his pleasure.

634-36 Henryson's Cresseid likewise curses "fals Cupide" and his mother Venus (Testament of Cresseid 134-35).

641 A poid is a toad; the word derives from poddock (DOST pode, poid).

649-52 The dreamer is "mobbed" (Parkinson 502-04); this blackening he undergoes bears comparison with the "spottis blak" with which Cresseid is punished (Testament of Cresseid 339).

653-54 These two perform the same function as do two fools in The Buke of the Howlat, the Lapwing and the Cuckoo; the names here are also suggestive of birds, skryme being a verb used for attacking birds in the Howlat ("skrym at myn e"; 67) and in Dunbar's "Fenyeit Freir" (123), and (less plausibly) chyppynuty referring to someone who (or something which) breaks nuts. B's suggestion that these names are "nicknames for malicious goblins" (185-86) is supported by one of them being surnamed fery ("fairy"). There may be some connection here with the attendants of the Scottish Lords of Misrule (the "King of the Bean" at Epiphany and the "Abbot of Unreason" at Shrovetide and in May), which were called dablets (Anna Jean Mill, Medieval Plays in Scotland [Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1927], pp. 313-27).

664-702 Marginal notes in L: The Auctor accused (665); Answer (684); Appellationem (692). This defense conforms to practices of Scottish law (indictment, plea for mercy, declaration of innocence, objection to the competency of the court; see Habakkuk Bisset's Rolment of Courtis, ed. Sir Philip J. Hamilton-Grierson [Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1920], I, 174). In Henryson's Fables, the accused sheep uses similar arguments in his defense (1187-1201).

665 B finds it "unlikely that any specific historical Varius is here alluded to. . . . [The] name seems a punning reference to the traditional fickleness and uncertainty of the love-goddess" (186).

666 The preposition tyl ("to") is the common form of the word in early sixteenth-century Scots and appears frequently in L, though not in E; accusyng uses the -ing suffix to mark the infinitive, an anglicism in Older Scots courtly style (see also 729).

674 The simile is proverbial (Whiting K16).

688-95 In Henryson's "The Sheep and the Dog," the accused sheep likewise objects against his "juge suspect" (Fables 1180).

691 A pathetic facial expression is appropriate during an oration (Cicero, De Oratore 2.189-96); Lydgate considers it the proper "look" for a poet about to recite (Siege of Thebes prologue 175; Troy Book 2.870-99).

695 B cites Sir Gilbert of the Haye: "the law sais that it sittis nocht till a womman to mell hir with the thingis that pertenis to jugement of men . . . a thing that is of lawar condicioun may nocht be juge till ane thing that is of hyar condicioun" (Buke of the Law of Armys [4.108] 251).

696-99 Douglas attempted this plea (to be tried by a judge who had ecclesiastical jurisdiction) with equal lack of success in 1515, when he was tried for attempting to buy the office of Bishop of Dunkeld (Small 1.lxii-lxiii).

697 This gesture of modesty is conventional (capitatio benevolentiae).

706 Marginal note in L: A thretnyng.

712 This reference to the poet's first arrival at the Court of Venus may seem an autobiographical allusion; probably it refers, however, to the poet's entry into the pleasant place, at the start of the poem.

716-17 There is a cluster of proverbs ironically referring to the speed and "sharpness" of snails (Whiting S416-17, 421, 425).

718-22 Compare The Legend of Good Women F 322-24, where Cupid makes a similar charge against the poet.

731 This is the second reference to facial color (see 652): the dreamer, having had his face daubed with some black substance, turns pale with fear and anxiety.

735 C. S. Lewis saw this as a psychologically revealing detail (Allegory 291).

738-44 The fear of transformation is "subtly Ovidian" (B 59).

747-51 Jupiter transformed his paramour Io into a heifer when his wife Juno came along; she kept the heifer under the guard of hundred-eyed Argus until Mercury rescued it (Metamorphoses 1.583-746).

749 yymmyt. L: ?ymmyt, from OE ?eman, to guard, care for, attend, govern.

752-53 The story of Lot's wife, transformed into a pillar of salt for looking back over her shoulder at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:26), has been mingled with that of the Theban queen Niobe, who continues to weep for her dead children even after she has been turned into marble (Metamorphoses 6.146-312).

754-55 In punishment for serving Jupiter human flesh, Lycaon was turned into a wolf (Metamorphoses 1.163-64, 209-52).

756 In the height of his pride, King Nebuchadnezzar suddenly became like an animal, "and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers and his nails like birds' claws" (Daniel 5:30-33; Confessio Amantis 1.2785-3042).

761-62 A topic around which several proverbs have gathered (Whiting M170, S428, W719).

771 An alliterative tag (DOST bare 4b; blis 1).

772 Marginal note in L: Consolation.

775-79 A periphrasis for God, who has prepared a means for the dreamer's rescue because a blessed soul has interceded on the dreamer's behalf.

792 Marginal note in L: Poetis.

801 Meters of classical verse, the sapphic being a lyric meter (a favorite of Horace's in his Odes), and the elegiac a popular and versatile meter (e.g., for epigrams and inscriptions) which was frequently used by Ovid (as in the Art of Love and the Heroides).

802-03 Douglas appears to be referring to a single-stringed monochord of the sort used by Pythagoras to demonstrate the proportions between musical intervals (Court of Sapience 2040-58; Marcuse 197); B takes Douglas to mean that the string never slipped out of tune. By the sixteenth century, monochords had several strings and were sometimes keyed. See line 504 and note.

804 The psaltree is the lyre; the word is used to translate the Latin citharis in line 863.

805-07 "Division of accents" may mean rapid melodic figuration based on a relatively simple sequence of notes; "long measure" would thus be the rhythm of the basic sequence, which is "held," not distorted.

806 the mesure. E's reading, which I prefer for metrical reasons. Conceivably L's omission of the could indicate that mesure was pronounced in three syllables; but early sixteenth century is late for a phonemic -e.

808-09 Douglas imagines Ovid's Heroides as choral performances. Classical poets were thought of in the fifteenth century as having sung their works to mimed accompaniment (Troy Book 2.867-904).

810-15 Heroides 2, 1, and 20-21: Acontius tricked Cydippe into swearing to Diana that she would marry no one but him.

819-21 Subtle use of the "colors" (devices) of rhetoric, and maintenance of clear, unvarying meter are singled out here as the prime skills of the poet.

833 mate seems an over-familiar way to refer to Venus; the reading in E, or meit ("or meet"), does not make sense in context, however.

836 Henryson also lays stress on polite termes (Fables 3, 2716; Testament of Cresseid 241) in discussing rhetoric.

838-39 At the beginning of his translation of the Aeneid, Douglas calls Virgil "flude of eloquens, . . . sweit sours and spryngand well" (1.prologue 4, 9).

840 Helicon. L: hylicon; E: Helicon.

844-46 These paradoxical phrases (pleasure and merriment are fleeting, not steadfast or constant; joy and discipline might be considered opposites) express "the traditional view of the poet's office: to teach and to delight" (B 57).

852 Metamorphoses 5.310 may be the source for naming Thespis as mother of the Muses, whose parentage is usually assigned to Jupiter and Mnemosyne.

854-79 Marginal note in L: The nyne muses. B notes that these lines on the functions of the Muses are based closely upon a short Latin poem often included in early editions of Virgil, De Musarum inventis.

858-59 In De Musarum inventis (and generally in classical tradition), Thalia is the Muse of comedy and eclogue: wanton wryt comes from the phrase lascivo . . . sermone in the Latin source.

862-65 Terpsichore is more correctly the Muse of dance. Erato is the Muse more commonly associated with the lyre itself, and also with lyric poetry. Douglas owes the confusion to his Latin original.

866-67 More explicitly than does his source, Douglas associates Polyhymnia with command of the colors of rhetoric.

877-78 Perhaps "epic" is a misleading way to translate heroicus, which in this context refers to the high courtly style (Blyth, pp. 60-62, 164-67).

881 Nymphs are female personifications of natural objects, those associated with water being called Naiads (among them, the sisters of Narcissus; Metamorphoses 3.505-06).

882 E offers a less bizarre reading here: fair Ladyis for Phanee. Still, L's reading is explainable in the light of Dunbar's spelling Phanus for "Faunus" (Goldyn Targe 119); if Phanee refers to "fauns," the word cannot be synonymous with the following phrase, "ladyis of thir templis ald," but must rather be the first item in a list of various personages in the retinue of the Muses.

883 The Pyerides, the nine daughters of Pierus, rivals to the Muses; Calliope defeated them in a contest of song, and Urania turned them into magpies (Metamorphoses 5.293-678); dryads are tree-nymphs (followers of the goddess Ceres; Metamorphoses 8.746-50); satyrs are boisterous inhabitants of forests, often depicted (like their traditionally gentler counterparts in Roman tradition, the fauns) with goat's legs (Marsyas was a satyr who challenged Apollo to a contest in music, and, losing, was flayed by the god; Metamorphoses 6.382-400).

884 The Nereids are the sea-maidens, the fifty daughters of the sea-god Nereus and the nymph Doris (Metamorphoses 13.742-43); Aonia is a name for Boeotia, where Mount Helicon (home of the Muses) stands - Aonians are thus the Muses' neighbors or attendants; the Napaeae are forest nymphs.

888, 890 Note the close occurrence of the alternative forms afore and tofore in L; in E, befoir is used in both spots.

896-97 Marginal note in L: Homer. Like the praises of Homer in Troilus and Criseyde (1792) and The House of Fame (1466), this probably does not indicate familiarity with Iliad or Odyssey (Bawcutt, "Library" 111).

898 Marginal note in L: Virgil and other latin poetis.

900 Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius, supposed participants in and chroniclers of the Trojan War, the first from the Greek side, the second, from the Trojan.

901 Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), Italian humanist, famed for his discoveries of classical manuscripts and notorious for his invectives; it may not be alliteration alone that finds him a place beside the Roman comic poet Plautus and satirist Persius.

902 Although Terence was a Roman author of comedies, his plays were used as school texts for learning Latin grammar; he thus earns a spot with the grammarians Donatus and Servius.

903 The Roman Valerius Flaccus and the Italian laureate Francis Petrarch were both authors of uncompleted epics (Argonautica and Africa respectively).

904 Aesop and Cato, supposed authors, respectively, of Fables and Distichs, elementary school-texts in the fifteenth century; Alain de Lille (c. 1127-1203), author of the allegorical poems Anticlaudianus and De planctu naturae.

905 Douglas may be referring here to Gualterus Anglicus, author of a late twelfth-century Latin version of Aesop which was a principal source for Henryson's Fables; Anicius Manlius Boethius is the late Roman philosopher, author of The Consolation of Philosophy, widely circulated and translated throughout the Middle Ages.

906 Quintilian (AD 35 - c. 95), whose eminence as a rhetorical authority rose in 1416, when Poggio Bracciolini discovered a complete manuscript of his Institutio oratoria; that work was first printed in 1470.

907 Juvenal, the second-century Roman satirist; Chaucer had referred to him as a moral authority (Troilus and Criseyde 4.197, CT III.1192-94).

908 mixt refers to the first-century Roman poet Martial's versatility of mood and meter, as revealed in his Epigrams. In a letter mourning the poet's death, the Younger Pliny called him "talented, subtle, penetrating, witty, and sincere."

909 Statius wrote the Thebaid (AD 90), an epic on the quarrel between the sons of Oedipus; bruyt here may simply be "fame" (OED s.v. bruit); but, more specifically, the word means "history," alluding to the medieval English chronicle Brut (OED brute, sb2).

910 Laurence of the vale, as in E; L reads Laurence of Vale. Neither is metrically satisfactory, though L is perhaps preferable. Fausto Andrelini (1462-1518), laureated by the Roman Academy, a humanist poet and editor of Ovid.; Lorenzo Valla (1407-57), humanist philosopher and rhetorician, editor of the Greek New Testament, and adversary of Poggio Bracciolini (see lines 1232-33).

911-12 Giulio Pomponio Leto (1425-98), pupil of Lorenzo Valla and commentator on Virgil; B notes that fame of late may refer to this humanist's recent and spectacular funeral.

913 Horace, Roman poet (65-8 BC), whose works (notably the Odes and Satires) were regaining eminence in the late fifteenth century.

915 Brunell may, as B suggests, be the Italian humanist Leonardo Bruni (1369-44); Claudian (late fourth century), the last great Latin poet in the classical tradition, whose description of the mountain-top home of Venus in De nuptiis Honorii et Mariae may have influenced Douglas's description of the palace in Part Three; Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75), Italian humanist author, best known in late fifteenth-century Scotland and England for his encyclopedic Latin prose works, notably On the Falls of Illustrious Men (De casibus virorum illustrium), John Lydgate's version (The Fall of Princes) of a French translation of which was commonly referred to as "Bochas."

918 Brutus Albion refers to the whole island of Britain, which Douglas elsewhere calls the yle of Albion (Eneados XIII. prol. 105, Conclusio 11). Brutus was the descendant of Aeneas reputed to have conquered Britain.

919 Marginal note in L: Chauser and other englyshe and Scottishe Poetis. For Douglas, Chaucer takes prime place in the conventional fifteenth-century triumvirate of famous English poets (with Gower and Lydgate; Dunbar, Goldyn Targe 253-70); he is to English poets what Virgil has come to seem overall when Douglas uses the phrase a per se to typify the status of the Latin poet (Eneados I. prol. 8).

920 Chaucer gave Gower the epithet moral (Troilus and Criseyde V. 1856), and it stuck.

921 The fifteenth-century Benedictine monk John Lydgate was the pre-eminent English poet of the generation after Chaucer, best known for his massive versions of Guido Colonna's Historia destructionis troiae (Troy Book; 1412-20) and of Boccaccio's De casibus, (The Fall of Princes 1431-38), and for the dream-visions The Temple of Glass and The Complaint of the Black Knight (known in Scotland as The Maying or Disport of Chaucer); in the prologue to his Siege of Thebes, Harry Bailly leads the returning Canterbury pilgrims in laughing at the monk Lydgate when they see him riding abstractedly along (70-91).

923 The pairing of the Scottish poets Walter Kennedy and William Dunbar may allude to their collaborative performance The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie, an exchange of scurrilous verse invectives; this possibility is strengthened by the reference in the next line to Quyntyne, a shadowy figure at the Scottish court, named as Kennedy's second in the Flyting. Unlike most of the authors in this catalogue, these two are yit undede, Dunbar being heard of until 1513, Kennedy being referred to as "in poynt of dede" in Dunbar's lament Timor mortis conturbat me (c. 1505).

924 The word huttok is obscure. It may be related to the equally obscure English word hattock, which OED glosses as "a small hat," -ock being the Scots diminutive suffix; DOST, on the other hand, goes no further than to query the word. This huttok is something distinctive about Quintin, and may possibly be a badge of some office at the Scottish court.

944 Marginal note in L: Venus complaint.

960 The declaration of chakmate against persons derives from Chaucerian tradition (e.g., Troilus and Criseyde 2.752; Fall of Princes 1. prol. 26).

961-66 This defense parallels that made by Alceste on behalf of the dreamer Chaucer to the God of Love (The Legend of Good Women F prologue 431-41).

969 Calliope is recommending that the dreamer serve as Venus' herald, proclaiming her commands to every region.

973 "Without prayer or price" is proverbial (Whiting P370).

981 Marginal note in L: Mercy becumys all men and specily gentylwemen.

983-87 A conventional set of antifeminist comparisons: in Walter Bower's continuation of the Scottish history Scottichronicon (c. 1449) appear similar comparisons with dragons and devils (2.376); the balade "Devise, prowes, and eke humilitee" (recurrent in sixteenth-century compilations of Scots verse) calls a wife "Thou devillis member, thou cursit homycide, / Thou tigir tene, fulfild of birnyng fyre, / . . . . Thou cocatras, that with the sicht of thy ire / Affrayit has full mony a gudely syre" (Chepman and Myllar Prints, p. 146; Utley 124).

987 These "wise clerks" are the ones who only a little while before Venus had called "sharp as snails" (717).

991 The line may be corrupt, as B suggests; on the other hand, this may be an intricate example of hyperbaton, the distortion of expected word-order.

1015-35 The rhetorical figure most heavily relied upon here is periphrasis, the multiplication of synonymous words and phrases.

1016 Marginal note in L: a ballat for venus plesour.

1041 A shower as an onset of grief or suffering is an example of pathetic fallacy, one of the rhetorical colors of the Scots courtly style.

1048 As B points out, L's reading campion is more respectful and appropriate to the situation than E's companioun.

1058 An example of Douglas's mingling of Christian doctrine and classical-mythological lore: the dreamer will pray to God to bless the Muse Calliope.

1065 Marginal note in L: Thankesgyvyng.

1071 Like the dreamer, this Nymph is never named in the poem. Having been entrusted into her care, he calls her "my keeper," and indeed she has to guide and even carry him past danger (1309-11, 1339-41 1926-29). She is also his "governour" (1169), an instructor from whom he learns the significations of objects he sees on his journey; she functions as does the Eagle in The House of Fame. This Nymph is no meek, willowy little thing: she can lift the dreamer (by his hair, if necessary; 1340), and does not hesitate to scold and insult him when he does not keep up with her (1308, 1866-68, 1936-38).

1073 The woodbind or common honeysuckle is associated with Maying (The Knight's Tale, CT 1.1508).

1081-84 Marginal note in L: The auctours vyage. A similar formula for movement through varied landscapes occurs at line 1246. The aerial perspective is somewhat akin to Geoffrey's flight in The House of Fame.

1086-89 This list of nations, zigzagging across Europe, recalls a similarly chaotic sequence in the early sixteenth-century Scots burlesque poem Lichtoun's Dreme (28-30).

1092-134 Ovid lists rivers in his description of the disastrous flight of Phaethon (Metamorphoses 2.213-73); Bartolomaeus provides a substantial catalogue of mountains (On the Properties of Things 2.695-717 [14.3-44]); Boccaccio lists both in his geographical dictionary De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus, et de nominibus maris (1350-60).

1093-94 The Greek city Pisa (in the western Peloponnese); nearby, Alpheus flows underground into the sea (Metamorphoses 5.639-41; Boccaccio 96-97).

1095 In the midst of a list of French rivers, France itself seems out of place.

1096 goldin sandyt is a conventional epithet for the Spanish river Tagus (Metamorphoses 2.251).

1097-98 Ovid describes Hercules' funeral pyre on Mount Oeta (Metamorphoses 9.229-38; also Boccaccio 38).

1099 Peneus is the largest river of Thessaly in Greece, flowing between the mountains Olympus and Ossa (Boccaccio 150-51).

1100 Tmolus is a mountain in Lydia (a kingdom on the mainland of Turkey), not Cilicia (further to the south), where Douglas (following Boccaccio 51) puts it (Metamorphoses 2.217).

1102 Mount Parnassus and the Castalian spring that flows from it were associated with worship of the Muses; the epithet twa toppyt is conventional (Metamorphoses 2.221).

1103 Haemus and Rhodope were the mountains on which Orpheus sojourned after losing his wife Eurydice for the second time (Metamorphoses 10.77; 2.219, 222).

1105 Mount Carmel (on the northern coast of Israel) was associated with the prophets Elijah and Elisha (1 Kings 18:19, 2 Kings 2:25), the former of whom had reputedly established a monastic community there (Boccaccio 17).

1107 The founding of the monastic Order of the Carmelites is dated in the mid-twelfth century.

1108-09 Located on the remote southeastern shore of the Black Sea, the river Thermodon was the home of the Amazons, a nation of warlike women (Metamorphoses 9.190; Boccaccio 164).

1110-12 Mimas, a range in Asia Minor (Metamorphoses 2.222; Boccaccio 35); Cithaeron, a range on the Greek mainland (Metamorphoses 2.223; Boccaccio 21).

1113 As B (195) shows, this description of Mount Olympus closely echoes that given by Boccaccio (38).

1114 Boccaccio describes Melas as a river in Greece, sacred to Minerva (137; see also Metamorphoses 2.247).

1116 The Tanais, or Don, River marked the boundary between Europe and Asia (Metamorphoses 2.242; Boccaccio 162-63).

1117 Sperchius, a Thessalian river which Ovid calls Spercheides (Metamorphoses 2.250; compare Boccaccio 161).

1118 Probably the Syrian river Orontes (Metamorphoses 2.249; Boccaccio 146); Douglas's version of the name (Achicorontes) can perhaps be explained as a misreading of Ovid's arsit Orontes.

1119 Ida, near Troy on the northwest shore of Turkey (Metamorphoses 2.218; Boccaccio 30).

1120 According to the Vulgate Bible, Noah's Ark landed upon the hills of Armenia (Genesis 8:4); the Euphrates is one of the great rivers of Mesopotamia, and is the fourth river of Eden (Genesis 2:14).

1123 Mount Dindyma, in Phrygia (west-central Turkey), on which stood a shrine to the goddess Cybele (Metamorphoses 2.223; Boccaccio 23-24).

1125 Scythia is the ancient name given to the land north and east of the Caspian Sea.

1126 Tigris is one of the great rivers of Mesopotamia, and (called Hiddekel) was named the third river flowing out of Eden (Genesis 2:14); Pison runs into the Black Sea, and was named the first river of Eden (Genesis 2:11).

1127 For this pairing, see Metamorphoses 2.257.

1128 Modin was a fortified town in mountainous country in Judaea (1 Maccabees 2:23, 13:30, 16:4; 2 Maccabees 13:14).

1129 Helicon, mountain in Greece dedicated to the Muses, on which the Hippocrene fountain springs; calling this spring facund, Douglas refers to the wealth of eloquence it imparts to the one who drinks here.

1130 Eryx, a mountain in western Sicily, the site of a temple to Aphrodite (Metamorphoses 2.221, 5.363); Acheron, a river of the Underworld, as well as one which emerges from a gorge in western Greece, neither of which are normally associated with Venus.

1133 Birthplace of Apollo, on the island of Delos.

1134 Unless the Muses have doubled back towards Mount Helicon (line 1129), there seems to be a distinction made between Hippocrene and Caballine fountains, two names which are usually taken as synonymous.

1141-43 The dreamer re-enacts a common rhetorical gesture of modesty, derived from Persius, Satires, prologue 1.

1150 In English and Scots courtly verse, descriptions of the "pleasant place" typically include details about clear water flowing over a glittering stream-bed (Goldyn Targe 36; Complaint of the Black Knight 78). The phrase sterny greis (compare E: stanerie greis) is hard, greis usually referring to steps.

1156-59 B provides a gloss for this obscure sentence: "Whoever imprints within his heart their fresh beauty, fair appearances . . . [i.e., if anyone could do this] it would almost cause a wise man to swoon."

1160 writhyt. The women's beauty is so dazzling that even Nature is thrown into confusion. Wrythyst 2 ppt. of wryith, to writhe, twist, wrench out of position.

1162-66 Having finished his description of the pleasant place, Douglas breaks off his description of the Muses with this rhetorical confession of the inexpressibility of his subject (Pearsall 144).

1173 Marginal note in L: The gates.

1181-83 An interlude is a play short and simple enough to stage to present between the courses of a banquet; it may consist largely of debate over an important ethical question, interspersed with moments of knockabout farce; ethical debate and farce are suitable counterparts, as the following performances demonstrate.

1186-87 In The House of Fame, Chaucer calls Ovid "Venus clerk" (1487); Douglas gives him the Scottish court office of Clerk of Register, and emphasizes his connection with heroic subjects.

1189 Marginal note in L: Valiant Knightis. The laurel crown is the badge of literary pre-eminence (Bawcutt, RES).

1192 Ovid provides a brief list of the Labors of Hercules, including his descent and return from Hades: Metamorphoses 9.182-99.

1195-96 Chaucer (drawing on Boccaccio and Statius), not Ovid, refers to this war (CT I.866-67).

1197 Metamorphoses 8.169-71.

1198-1200 Metamorphoses 4.610-5.249.

1201-03 Metamorphoses 8.270-546.

1204-06 Metamorphoses 11.751-95.

1207-15 Metamorphoses 12.64-145.

1216-21 Referring to Metamorphoses, Heroides, Ars Amatoria, and Remedia Amoris.

1225 Marginal note in L: Poetis.

1226 In Virgil's Eclogue 2, the shepherd Corydon is a would-be lover; he wins the verse competition of Eclogue 7, to which Daphnis listens; Daphnis is sung to in Eclogue 8.

1227-28 Refers to Terence's comedy Eunuchus.

1229-30 Juvenal's behavior is what is expected of a satirist at court; it is the posture William Dunbar assumes in his court satires addressed to James IV ("Off benefice, Sir, at everie feist" 7; "Schir, yit remember as befoir" 7-10).

1231 Coquus ("the cook") was Martial's medieval nickname. As a satirical epigrammatist, he frequently "roasts" the people about whom he writes.

1232-33 Poggio Bracciolini wrote Invectives against Lorenzo Valla, his rival in scholarship.

1239 Canterbury Tales 1.199, on the sweating Monk, may be the source for this simile.

1244 David was anointed king of Judah at Hebron (2 Samuel 2.1), where the sepulchres of Adam, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were reputedly located, and where the "dry tree" stood which will come into leaf when the Christians conquer the Holy Land (Mandeville 47, 49); Adam was traditionally held to have been created "in the feeld of Damyssene" (The Monk's Tale, CT 7.2007).

1245 The valley of Jehoshaphat, where, during the Last Judgment, the heathen shall be gathered (Joel 3:2, 12-13).

1249-51 The exact location of this plesand roch is unclear; it may be significant that the two places last named (Hebron and Damascus; 1244) are in the Holy Land rather than the world of Greek antiquity, since arriving at this mountain calls for a prayer of thanksgiving to God.

1254 The trembling pen is a Lydgatian topic of modesty (Troy Book 1.4426-28, Fall of Princes 1.5517-18; Pearsall 145); see also line 1283.

1255-58 The trembling poetic narrator takes off on 1 Corinthians 2:9.

1259-62 From Aeneid 6.625-27: there, the Sibyl is claiming inability to catalogue to Aeneas the torments of the damned in the fortress of Dis.

1264-66 From 2 Corinthians 12:2-3. Chaucer likewise draws on this passage, The House of Fame 980-82.

1267-75 Douglas's English contemporary John Skelton has similar comments on disparagers of his work: "For the gyse nowadays / Of sum jangelyng jays / Is to discommende / That they can not amende" (Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell 1261-64; likewise Stephen Hawes, Pastime of Pleasure 792-819).

1269 The assertion that dreams are "not worth a mite" is proverbial (Whiting D387, M611).

1288-96 Marginal note in L: Invocacion. For a brief history of the formulae of invocation of the Muses, see Curtius 232 n., 234, 239.

1298-99 The hill is a maze of error, and only one path will reach the summit; the image is based on a well-established distinction between heresy and true faith (Doob 76-78).

1300-01 The mountain on which Chaucer's House of Fame stands is like "alum de glas" (1124).

1322-23 If Douglas is following Homer, he does so at some remove from his ultimate source, according to which, Hera (Juno) gets Hephaestus (Vulcan) to use fire against the river Xanthus in Achilles' fight against it (Iliad 21.328-82).

1336 Marginal note in L: Idyll people punyshed.

1338-40 In the apocryphal conclusion to the Book of Daniel ("Bel and the Dragon"), an angel lifts the prophet Habakkuk by his hair in order to carry him to the imprisoned Daniel (Vulgate Daniel 14:23).

1354 L's reading palyce is taken to mean "dwelling place" here (see line 52); the word sets up a contrast between this destination and the far happier one up ahead.

1380-82 Marginal note in L: Faythles peopill. On shipwreck as an emblem for the destruction of the faithless, see 1 Timothy 1:19.

1387 From St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians 2:3.

1393-94 Douglas is expounding a doctrine of salvation through faith and good works; in the prologue to Book II of his translation of the Aeneid, he similarly emphasizes that a sinner must act well in order to merit grace (155-68).

1401 This is Douglas's ideal of eloquence (Bawcutt, Douglas 86, 160, 206).

1410 This admission that one's writing does no more than blacken paper is commonplace in Lydgate (Pearsall 145, 149); compare Douglas's earlier modest references to his pen (1254, 1283).

1411 A highly traditional topic of continuation (The Knight's Tale, CT 1.886-87; Troy Book 5.2927-31; Bawcutt, Douglas 169).

1413-27 The pleasant place at its most Edenic (Curtius 192, 200): lion and lamb together (Isaiah 11:6), and all plants in season (Genesis 2:9).

1424 As Norton-Smith points out (252), the correct reading at the end of this line is fare, meaning "disturbance" (MED fare n.6).

1426 Marginal note in L: The discription of the palace.

1429-37 The "enumeration of technical details" is a rhetorical convention in the description of buildings (The House of Fame 1189-94; Court of Sapience 2.1485-89; Norton-Smith, 242-43); in a paper read at a session of the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo (May 1989), Alasdair MacDonald suggested that Douglas based his description on the new Palace at Stirling Castle, with its great hall, gardens in the ward, pools and ditches, and Collegiate Church (Exchequer Rolls lxx, 18, 142, 144, 297, 314-17; Treasurer's Accounts cclxvi).

1433 While torris may refer to "towers," the context is a list of architectural ornament (see OED s.v. Tore, "an ornamental knob").

1437 spryngis is a variant of springer, a term for the moulding on which one foot of an arch is based (Norton-Smith 252).

1444-47 King James IV of Scots was an ardent enthusiast of tournaments (Fradenburg 153-71).

1452 Chaucer's Palace of Fame is made entirely of "ston of beryle" (The House of Fame 1184).

1453-54 Bezaleel and Aholiab, divinely-inspired builders of the Tabernacle, the temple of the Israelites, containing the Holy of Holies, the place of the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 31:2-6; 36:1-38:23; 25:33-34).

1455 On Solomon's building of the temple at Jerusalem, see 1 Kings 6:1-36.

1456 Probably refers to the building of the walls of Troy by the gods Apollo and Neptune, mentioned by Horace (Odes 3.3.21). See the earlier reference to Amphion, lines 511-12.

1457 Possibly drawn from CT 3.498-99, where Apelles is named as the maker of the tomb of Darius of Persia.

1473 Because of repetition of the word twelf, the line in L is hypermetrical, going against Douglas's practice of maintaining a ten-syllable line.

1475 Marginal note in L: Venus mirrour.

1483-85 Various jewels have the power to staunch the flow of blood: cornelian (corneolus), hematite (emachite), heliotrope (eliotropia), jasper, pearl (margarita), sapphire, smaragdus, and topaz (On the Properties of Things 2.843-77 [16.33-95]).

1492 A legendary mirror which enabled the Romans to see whether neighboring countries intended peace or war (see also Confessio Amantis 5.2031-2224; The Buke of the Sevyne Sagis 1650-76).

1493-94 In this mirror Canacee could discover oncoming danger and distinguish between friend and foe (The Squire's Tale, CT 5.132-36).

1500 in the erth ysent refers to Adam's banishment from Paradise (Genesis 3:23-24).

1503 B points out that subversyoun echoes a reference ("de subversione urbium"; Genesis 19:29) in the Latin Vulgate Bible to the fall of Sodom.

1505 The medieval tradition that Moses' face was horned (rather than shining) when he descended from Sinai derives from the Vulgate text at Exodus 34:29. Douglas anticipates when he mentions Moses' horns and "ald Ebrew law" before alluding to the Plagues and the crossing of the Red Sea.

1506 According to Exodus 7-12, ten plagues took place: E's reading is thus preferable to L's Twelf; "thair trespas" refers to the obstinacy of the Egyptians in the Biblical narrative.

1507-10 The story is told in Exodus 14.

1509 Marginal note in L: A lang catathaloge of nobyll men and wemen both of scriptur & gentyll stories.

1511 The Israelites under Moses were condemned by God to wander for forty years in the wilderness (Numbers 14:33; Deuteronomy 29:5).

1512 These "wars" (notably against Jericho) are the subject of Joshua 6-12.

1514 See Judges 11 for the Israelite warrior Jephthah (whom Douglas mentioned before, line 338), and Judges 6-8 for Gideon.

1515 In order to become king, Gideon's bastard son Abimelech murdered all his seventy brothers except the youngest, who escaped (Judges 9:1-5).

1517-19 The Israelite hero Samson killed a thousand of his Philistine enemies with the "a new jawbone of an ass" (Judges 15:15); he carried off the gates to the city of Gaza (Judges 16:3); and he pulled down the house (not the temple) of the Philistines, killing himself and three thousand of his enemies (Judges 16:22-30).

1520-21 Shamgar killed six hundred Philistines (Judges 3:31; according to the King James Version of the Bible, his weapon was an ox-goad, not a ploughshare as in the Vulgate).

1522-23 Samuel anointed Saul to signify he would be king (1 Samuel 10:1).

1523-24 1 Samuel 14:6-20.

1525-26 1 Samuel 17:40-51. The weight of Goliath's spearhead is given in 1 Samuel 17:7 (six hundred shekels, two shekels to an ounce).

1527-29 2 Samuel 21:16-22. Four giants (a brother and a nephew of Goliath, as well as his sons Ishbibenob - Vulgate Jesbibenob - and a nameless son with six digits on each hand and foot) are defeated by four followers of the aging King David.

1530 1 Samuel 17:34-37.

1531-32 David's "three mighty men" defeated the Philistines despite being ambushed by them on several occasions; Adino killed eight hundred at once (2 Samuel 23:8-12; compare the Vulgate version of verse 8, in which David himself is said to be one of three who killed eight hundred).

1533-39 For David's champion Benaiah (Vulgate Banaias), see 2 Samuel 20-21: he killed two lions, a lion in a pit, and an Egyptian warrior.

1540 Marginal note in L: Salomon.

1542-45 Because Rehoboam refused to be kind to his people, all the tribes except those of Judah and Benjamin rejected his kingship (1 Kings 12:13-19).

1546-48 2 Kings 19:35 (the Vulgate has 185,000 as the number slain); for the "gret bost," see 2 Kings 19:10-13.

1549 God grants the dying King Hezekiah fifteen more years of life; Isaiah heals the King (2 Kings 20:6-7).

1550-51 Elijah's ascent to heaven is witnessed by his successor Elisha (2 Kings 2:11).

1552 Ezra 7-10:17; Nehemiah 1-7:5, 13.

1553 Daniel 6.

1554 Referring to the apocryphal chapter "Bel and the Dragon" (Daniel 14 in the Vulgate Bible).

1555 The three young Israelites Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego, condemned by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar to burn in a fiery furnace for refusing to worship a golden statue (Daniel 3).

1556 The deportation of the Israelites into Babylon (2 Kings 24:14, 25:11), transmigration being the specialized term used in the Vulgate for this (Ezra 6:16; 8:35).

1558-62 The story told in the apocryphal Book of Tobit (Vulgate Tobias): Tobias is to become the eighth husband of Sarah, but unless he manages to "unbind Asmodaeus the evil demon from her" (3:17), he will suffer the same fate as the seven previous husbands; the angel Raphael advises him to drive the demon away with the smell of the burning heart and liver of a fish (6:10-18).

1563-64 Having gone into the encampment of the Assyrian general Holofernes and been entertained by him, Judith beheaded him (the apocryphal Book of Judith 7-15).

1565-66 Based on Jonah 1:17 and 2:10; B notes that Douglas may be indebted to Chaucer for the notion that Jonah was "schot furth" at the inland city Nineveh (CT 2.486-87).

1568-69 Given the Biblical context of this reference to the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great, it is likely (as B suggests) that Douglas is relying on the summary of Alexander's career at the beginning of the apocryphal First Book of Maccabees (1:1-8).

1570-71 The oppression of the Jews by the Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes is summarized in 1 Maccabees 1:21-67.

1572-74 Judas Maccabeus ("The Hammer"), whose exploits are the subject of 1 Maccabees 3-9:18 and 2 Maccabees 8-15.

1575-76 Jonathas is the subject of 1 Maccabees 9:28-13:23; Simon, of 13:1-16:22.

1577-84 Douglas need not have drawn directly on Statius' Thebaid for this summary; see lines 2120-2235 of Siege of Thebes for Lydgate's account of the Theban ambush of Tydeus, and lines 4028-46 for the fate of Amphiorax (also Troilus and Criseyde 2.104-05).

1581-82 Theseus' victory at Thebes is summarized in Chaucer's Knight's Tale (CT 1.986-90; see also Siege of Thebes 4525-53).

1585-87 Canterbury Tales 1.896-964; as B notes, however, Lydgate provides a more exact source for the phrase "all barfute" (Siege of Thebes 4469). The marginal note to these lines in L reads Faythfull & constent women.

1588-93 The ironic praise of women is a hallmark of Lydgate's style: see Siege of Thebes 4448-52, Fall of Princes 1.4719-816, and further, Pearsall 118-19, 134-36, 216-18).

1594-96 The Centaur's attempted abduction of Pirithous' bride from the wedding feast and the ensuing brawl are described in gory detail in Metamorphoses 12.210-530. See also Confessio Amantis 6.485-529.

1597-1602 For Hercules's rescue of Hesione and his revenge on her ungrateful father Laomedon, see Metamorphoses 11.211-15 and Confessio Amantis 5.7195-7224 and 8.2515-24.

1603-05 Medea, sorceress and princess of Colchis, enabled Jason to steal the Golden Fleece from her country (Metamorphoses 7.1-158; Confessio Amantis 5.3247-4222; Troy Book 1.131-3714).

1606 Hypsipyle, princess of Lemnos, whom Jason bedded and then left behind on his way to the Golden Fleece (Siege of Thebes 3188-92).

1607-11 Having referred already (1597-1602) to Ovid's version of the Greek overthrow of the Trojan king Laomedon, Douglas alludes to Lydgate's version (Troy Book 1.3718, 4063-4307), or Gower's (Confessio Amantis 5.7195-7224).

1612-14 Disputing over the Golden Apple of Discord (to be awarded to the most beautiful), the goddesses Juno, Minerva, and Venus appealed to the judgment of the most handsome of men, Paris, who awarded the apple to Venus and earned the hatred of the two others (Heroides 16.51-88; Confessio Amantis 5.7400-7588; Troy Book 2.2520-2809).

1619-20 The sea-nymph Thetis disguised her son Achilles as a girl so that he would not be called to Troy; Ulysses tricked him into revealing his identity (Metamorphoses 13.162-73; Confessio Amantis 5.2961-3201).

1628-29 After a digest of events in the Trojan War, Douglas draws upon Virgil's Aeneid, Book 2, for these details.

1630-56 An interesting summary of the Aeneid, much of which (1637-46) concerns Book 6, on Aeneas' journey to the Underworld. By contrast, Chaucer had given most attention to Book 4 (the story of Dido and Aeneas) in his summary (The House of Fame 143-467).

1641 Traditionally, the Underworld contains five rivers, rather than four: Styx, Acheron, Cocytus, and (further down) Phlegethon, as well as Lethe.

1643 Sisyphus was condemned by Jupiter to push a stone to the top of a hill only to have it roll back each time (Metamorphoses 4.459, 13.27; Aeneid 6.616).

1644 The Elysian Fields, where the blessed souls dwell (Aeneid 6.640-59). Douglas echoes this line in Eneados 6. prol. 100.

1645-46 Anchises' revelations concerning the future greatness of Rome (Aeneid 6.756-885).

1647-51 Aeneid 7.5-7. For all his insistence on conciseness, Douglas is hardly briefer than Virgil here.

1652 Aeneid 7.107-16. Extreme hunger had been predicted for Aeneas and his people before they reached their destination (3.255).

1653-54 The couplet echoes The House of Fame 147-48: "In Itayle, with ful moche pyne, / Unto the strondes of Lavyne."

1656 Turnus, Aeneas' fiercest adversary in the battle for Latium; his death ends the work.

1657 Livy's History of Rome 1.4-7.

1658-59 Livy's History of Rome 1.60 (244 years).

1660-65 Marginal note in L: Chast Lucretia. The rape of Lucretia by Sextus, son of King Lucius Tarquinius ("The Proud"), led to Brutus driving the offending family from Rome and abolishing the monarchy (Livy, History of Rome 1.57-60). See also Confessio Amantis 7.4593-5130.

1671-74 Marginal note in L: The constancye of Marcus regulus. Marcus Regulus, captured by the Carthaginians and sent to Rome to urge peace, advised the Romans to fight on, and returned to Carthage to die in captivity (Horace, Odes 3.5). The motif of "common profyt" (1674, 1678) that Douglas emphasizes here reminds one of Genius' emphasis on that theme in his discussion of good rule in Confessio Amantis.

1675 Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome and a good ruler, murdered by Lucius Tarquinius (Livy, History of Rome 1.39-48).

1676-80 Having heard the oracle that a chasm in the Forum would not close until Rome's greatest strength was sacrificed, Marcus Curtius leapt into the chasm (Livy, History of Rome 7.6); L's reading Quincyus (1676) may derive from confusion between this hero and the Roman historian Quintus Curtius.

1684-86 Scipio Africanus, hero of the Second Punic War, took Spain and defeated the Carthaginian general Hannibal (Livy, History of Rome 26.46; 30.32).

1688-89 Jugurtha, usurper of the North African kingdom of Numidia, object of repeated Roman attacks, finally captured and executed; the story is told by the Roman historian Sallust (The Jugurthine War).

1690-91 Having been defeated by Cicero in his bid to be elected consul, the disreputable Catiline embarked on rebellion and was defeated and killed; Sallust tells the story (The War of Catiline).

1692 This civil war is the subject of Lucan's epic Pharsalia; Chaucer refers to him and his poem (The House of Fame 1497-1502; CT 2.401, 7.2719).

1700-01 In this stanza, attention shifts from history to the present and future, apocalyptically considered. The Devil's growing success at winning souls is vividly depicted in Dunbar's "Renunce thy God and cum to me"; likewise, belief in the imminent appearance of the Antichrist is the context for Dunbar's "Lucina schynnyng in silence of the nicht."

1702 As did the catalogue of poetic recitations in the Second Part (1190-1233), the present list now moves from heroic deeds and serious matters to recreations and pastimes.

1709 There appears to be a distinction here between the adjectival verb ending -ing (questyng) and the present participle ending -and (syrchand).

1711 Rauf Coilyear, a late fifteenth-century Scots romance in alliterative stanzas, a tale about the encounters between a coal-pedlar and Emperor Charlemagne (incognito), in which emphasis is placed on burlesque of courtly conventions. See Alan Lupack's Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990), pp. 161-204.

1712 John the Reeve, a northern English verse-tale similar in plot and tone to the preceding romance; Colkelbie's Sow, a late fifteenth-century Scots sequence of three burlesque tales.

1713 Douglas may be referring to a localized version of one of the widespread folktales in which a wren plays a prominent part: nineteenth-century Scottish versions of "The Battle of the Birds and the Beasts" and "The King of the Birds" have been recorded (Campbell 1.49, 53, 285; Armstrong 135-37, 143-44, 202-03); he may also be referring to a particular manifestation of the custom of the "Hunting of the Wren," in which boys hunted and killed a wren on St. Stephen's Day (26 December), and then carried it in a funeral procession, singing a song (Herd 2.209-11). Ailsa Crag, a rocky islet north of the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea west of Galloway, is particularly noted by early chroniclers and travellers for its abundance of sea birds.

1714 Passus 6 of Piers Plowman seems out of place in this list of burlesque and popular tales; its inclusion here as a story in which Piers invites Hunger to pacify some rebellious laborers suggests that at least parts of Langland's work may have been valued as comedy by Douglas's audience.

1715 Goll Mac Morna, leader of the Fianna Fiall, the bodyguard of the High King of Ireland; and Finn Mac Cumhal, who took the place of Goll (his father's slayer) at the head of the Fianna and became one of the great heroes of Ireland. The Gaelic-speaking districts of West and North Scotland retained familiarity with Irish traditions well into the nineteenth century (Campbell 1.xxii-iv, xlvi, xciii, 4.47, 242). Lowland Scots were at least acquainted with these personages: an early sixteenth-century Edinburgh poem refers to Finn as a giant who "dang the devill and gart him yowle; / The skyis ranyd quhen he wald scowle / And trublit all the aire" ("Maner of the Crying of ane Playe" 33-36; Asloan Manuscript 2.150).

1717 B cites poem 68 of the Maitland Quarto manuscript, in which the "triumphant nobill fame" of Sir Richard Maitland is mentioned, along with "his auld baird gray" (147-48), the latter possibly referring to the name of a horse.

1718 Gilbert of the White Hand, called Robin Hood's equal in archery in the late fifteenth-century A Geste of Robyn Hode (stanzas 292, 401).

1719 The Hays of Naughton were a branch of the noble Hay family; Madin land is the name given to the land of the Amazons in Mandeville's Travels (83).

1720 Marginal note in L: Nigramansye. Nigramansy is a type of performance which depends more on machinery than on gesture for the creation of illusion; it was in vogue at the court of James IV, its most noted practitioner being Andrew Forman, Bishop of Moray (Baxter 167-68).

1721 B tentatively identifies Bonitas as Guido Bonatus de Forlivio, thirteenth-century astrologer and supposed magician whose treatises circulated widely during the fifteenth century (Thorndike 2.827, 839); Roger Bacon, a thirteenth-century Franciscan friar who became (along with Friar Bungay) "in popular tradition a nigromancer, conjurer, and magician" (Thorndike 2.680).

1722-28 These examples of juglory (tricks of illusion and transformation by sleight of hand; DOST juglery) parallel those in The House of Fame 1259-81 and The Buke of the Howlat 770-93.

1724 B cites the use of singing bone to refer to the "funny bone" (OED singing, 4).

1730 "Pastime and games" is the category for the various performances listed in the three previous stanzas, not the whole preceding catalogue of heroes.

1737 The silliness and cowardice of sheep are proverbial (Whiting S213, 204).

1746 Compare this assertion of readiness with the dreamer's subsequent hesitation (1757).

1756 Marginal note in L: By thys boke he menis Virgil; this assignment recalls the task Alceste sets for Chaucer (The Legend of Good Women F prologue 479-91) with one difference: whereas Alceste tells Chaucer what to write, Venus shows Douglas the book he will write (Morse 112).

1761 Marginal note in L: The Auctors conclution of Venus merour; this contradicts the poem, in which the "conclusion" (which does not offer an accurate description of the catalogue just finished) is the Nymph's.

1767 Marginal note in L: The Palice of honour is patent for honest vertuus men an[d] not for vicius fals & craftye pepyll.

1772 Cicero's book consists of his four speeches denouncing Catiline to the Senate of Rome (Against Catiline). These speeches (and especially the first) became models of invective oration.

1775 On Jugurtha, see note for 1688-89; the usurper Tryphon murdered Antiochus Epiphanes and Jonathas Maccabeus, only to be deposed (1 Maccabees 13:20-32, 14:1, 15:25-39).

1780 Marginal note in L: Falsehed the moder of al vice.

1785-88 Compare the two sorts of failure (idleness and faithlessness) shown in the fiery gulf (1315-83).

1790 Marginal note in L: Patience.

1792-1827 Allegorizing the officers of the royal court is a convention of fifteenth-century dream visions (King Hart 301-08; Court of Sapience 1471-1652).

1792-1824 Marginal note in L: The discriptio[n] of the Prince of hie honore wyth hys Palys & Court. Charity Constance. Liberalite Innocens devocyon Humanite Trew relation pease temperance. Humilite. discypline mercye Conscience justyse prudence diligens clene lyvyng. Hope. Piety. Fortitud, Veryte.

1798, 1801 At the Scottish court, the treasurer received royal revenue from feudal duties, fines, and special taxes; the comptroller administered royal revenue from rents, leases, and customs duties (Nicholson 566-67, 570).

1800 The clerk of closet and the cubicular were attendants to the king in his bedchamber, the first his private confessor, the second his groom or personal servant.

1806 The Cardinal Virtue of Temperance.

1807 Humility is the quality revealed by Chaucer's Squire in his carving at table for his father (CT 1.99-100).

1810-11 The Chancellor of a Scottish court "presided over the king's parliaments and councils and kept the king's great seal, the most solemn means of authenticating documents drawn up in chancery - the royal secretariat" (Nicholson 22); Conscience similarly refuses to let Meed sway his judgment in Piers Plowman Passus 3 (Passus 4 of C-text).

1814 The -ing suffix indicates the infinitive form of the verb here; the line in L is no less typical of Douglas and metrically correct than that in E (see B).

1816 The audit of the royal accounts was an annual affair performed by the Lords Auditours of the Exchequer, officers specially appointed for this duty (Nicholson 22-23).

1818 The outstewarts are managers of Crown lands (Nicholson 380).

1821 The almoner, a cleric connected with the royal chapel, responsible for the collection and distribution of the King's alms (Mertes, p. 50).

1834-36 Golden doors decorated with scenes (of military triumph not natural phenomena) open upon the shrine of Caesar in Virgil's Georgics (3.25-39); a closer parallel exists in Ovid's description of the silver doors of the palace of the Sun (Metamorphoses 2.3-20); Douglas is "[guided], perhaps, by allegorical interpretations of Ovid's Metamorphoses in which Helios was allegorised as God, and the throne of Helios as the Throne of Glory" (Norton-Smith 249).

1837 Ovid's description also begins with the depiction on the doors of the earth surrounded by the seas (2.5-6). The passage of the poet's lofty view as he looks down upon earth echoes Geoffrey's flight on the talons of the eagle in The House of Fame, and also Troilus's view of earth in the epilogue to Troilus and Criseyde.

1839 Water and earth are the other two elements.

1840-45 Douglas writes a similar catalogue of astronomical terms in Eneados 8. prol. 149-53.

1840 The seven spheres are the courses of the seven planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, the sun, and the moon) revolving around the earth according to the Ptolemaic system; the primum mobile, the source of planetary motion, is the outermost sphere moving on an axis, at either end of which are the Pole Stars (see note to lines 1843-44).

1841 Marginal note in L: Astronami. The signs of the twelve astrological houses on the zodiac are Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Sagittarius, Scorpio, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces.

1842 "Zodiacus is a cercle that passith aslont and is departid evene in twelve parties, the which xii parties philosophris clepith signes; and thise signes schewith to us what partie of heven the sonne and the planetis beth inne" (On the Properties of Things 1.460 [8.9]).

1843-44 The Pole Stars, arcticus being the one which "alway schineth to us and never gooth doun to oure sight, for alwey he is above us," and antarcticus, "the southeren sterre," which "is alwey unseyn to us" (On the Properties of Things 1.501 [8.22]); these two stars mark the uppermost and downmost points of "the spere of heven" on which the stars are fixed (1.457 [8.6]).

1844-45 Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the constellations known in North America as the Big Dipper and Little Dipper; the sevyn sterris are the Pleiades; Phaethon (according to Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.317-20) may be taken to be a shooting star or meteor, like the impressioun which shocks the dreamer at the outset of the poem (105), or it may be an epithet for the sun (Norton-Smith 253); the Charle wane is another name for Ursa Major.

1846-48 Ovid tells the story of the abduction of Ganymede in Metamorphoses 10.155-61; Douglas's allusion to this tale of divine lust contrasts with Douglas's previous emphasis on the moral worth of the officers at the court of Honour (1783-1827); as the only human being depicted on the gate, "Ganymede may represent the poet and other literary figures who were privileged to go on a celestial voyage in order to receive superior instruction about some Universal" (Norton-Smith 249).

1849-54 This passage is a fairly close translation of Metamorphoses 2.11-14, except that there the sea-nymphs have green hair and ride on fishes as well as swim.

1855-59 Similar lists of terms of astronomy occur in Henryson, Fables 628-41, and Court of Sapience 2108-70.

1856 In Ptolemaic astronomy, each of the seven planets was supposed to revolve on its own orbit (or epicycle) around the earth, but also to move along a greater circle (the deferent); opposition has occurred when two planets are exactly opposite to each other from the perspective of the earth, or when a planet is opposite to the sun ("it is a signe of parfite emnyte and bodeth worst happis, and namliche yif Mars hath soche aspecte to Saturnus othir to the sonne"; On the Properties of Things 1.465 [8.9]).

1857 In Ptolemaic astronomy, three kinds of planetary motion are distinguished: direct, stationary, and retrograde (On the Properties of Things 1.477-78 [8.11]).

1858 A planet's natural motion is its revolution in its sphere; its daily motion is its diurnal course across the sky in relation to a point on the zodiac (On the Properties of Things 1.476-77 [8.11]).

1859 Aspect is the position of a planet on the zodiac relative to another planet from the vantage point of the earth; digression is the apparent deviation in the courses of the "inferior planets" Venus and Mercury.

1862-63 This passage concludes where Douglas's source had begun, with the assertion that the artistry of the depictions exceeded the value of the material from which they were made (Metamorphoses 2.5).

1865 Norton-Smith compares this with the impatient shove Africanus gives the erring dreamer in Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls (153-54).

1866-68 "What devil" is a common expletive phrase (MED s.v. devil; DOST s.v. devil); for all its raciness of style, the Nymph's scolding may recall the Sibyl's rebuke of Aeneas for staring overlong at the depictions on the doors to Daedalus' temple of Apollo (Aeneid 6.37-39; Norton-Smith 249).

1878 The empyrean is the highest heaven, above the moving spheres; it is the home of the angels and the "contrey and wonynge of blisful men" (On the Properties of Things 1.454 [8.4]); whether or not he is to be taken as the Christian God, Honour lives in a place like Heaven; compare Lindsay, Dream, lines 514-18 (Works I.19).

1879-80 The tall tree and the low shrub are traditional emblems for high and low style (Curtius 201 n.; Norton-Smith 247).

1891 The breddyt doors and windows are shuttered, not boarded up: his view thus obstructed, the dreamer "must view the interior of the palace in a single, circumscribed peep" (Norton-Smith 253).

1898 By knots Douglas is referring to ornamental patterns of interlace, worked in gold and enamel upon the ivory; a devyse is an emblematic design inscribed with a motto.

1902 Topaz "schyneth most whan he is ysmyte with the sonne beeme, and passeth in clerenesse alle othere precious stones, and comforteth men and bestes to beholde and loke theronne. . . . And in tresorie of kynges nothing is more cleere ne more precious than this precious stone" (On the Properties of Things 2.877-78 [16.95]).

1903 The boir is a chink in the shutters on the door; see note to line 1891.

1913 Sapphire "hath vertue to reule and acorde hem that bene in stryf and helpeth moche to make pees and acorde"; in ancient times it was "singulerliche yhalowed to Appolyn" (On the Properties of Things 2.869-70 [16.86]).

1921 Armypotent is an epithet for Mars (CT 1.1124; Lydgate, Troy Book prologue 4; Lindsay, The Historie of Squyer Meldrum, line 390 [Works I.156] and The Testament of Squyer Meldrum, line 76 [Works I.190]. Compare Douglas' Aeneid 2.425, 6.839, 9.717). In its place in E appears the explicitly Christian term omnipotent, on which interpretations of the poem have hinged (Lewis 290; Spearing Dream 210-11; Kratzmann 117-19). E's reading might be taken as a Protestant editor's attempt to resolve Douglas's balance of pagan and Christian towards the latter at this crucial point, a resolution arguably present in E's weak substitution of Verteouslie for L's Victoriusly (1966; compare vertuus, 1964). If L's "Chaucerian adjective is the right reading, then perhaps the Mars-like figure on the throne is an oblique reference to King James" (Norton-Smith 252-53). To be sure, Mars has not previously been sighted in the Palace (1471); but Douglas's God of Honor also deserves comparison with Ovid's Sun-god (see note to lines 1834-36) and Chaucer's God of Love (see note following).

1922-24 With his brightness of face, this god recalls Chaucer's God of Love, whose hair is crowned with a sun: "Therwith me thoghte his face shoon so bryghte / That wel unnethes myghte I him beholde" (The Legend of Good Women F prol. 232-33); see also 1948-51; see also Henryson's lines on Apollo: "The brichtnes of his face quhen it was bair / Nane micht behald for peirsing of his sicht" (Testament 206-07).

1942 Carling (the feminine equivalent of "churl") is a common term of abuse in colloquial Older Scots (DOST carling).

1944 A cynically anticlerical jibe; having a common-law wife was not an unusual circumstance for a late-medieval priest, and was a topic of satire well before the Reformation (Dowden, pp. 309-19).

1946 Colloquial style accounts for the obscurity of the first word: in L, the adverb Langere ("longer") may be read as a terse, disjunctive version of "Had you remained unconscious any longer," and, later in the line, had is a compressed version of the past subjunctive ("you would have had"; Aitken, "Variational Variety," pp. 176-209). Less convincingly if more explicitly, E's version of the first word (Lang eir, "long before") implies that the Nymph's fears for the dreamer were aroused (and allayed) some time before he regained consciousness.

1953 L's reading malt appears to be the past tense of the verb melt, which is ungrammatical here; it may, however, be a corruption of the original reading, referring to the feebleness of the dreamer's heart (DOST melt, with meltit, melted, meltyn as usual forms of the past participle; MED melte, 1b, 2b); compare Pearl 1154: "My mane? mynde to maddyng malte."

1957 Referring to the court of the Muse Calliope.

1978-94 A summary of various traditional expressions about the transcience of earthly glory, conventional images included being the dream (1983; see Whiting L241), the sunbeam (1987), and the weltering sea (1989; see 1349-55; Whiting S113, 107); the passage ends with a catalogue of the powerful of church and state, all under the term of Death (Tristram 169-74; Woolf 325, 343-47).

1995 The doctrine of Good Works is best known through the moral play Everyman (906-07); see further 2013-15.

2000 Marginal note in L: A comendacion of vertue quhilk is the vay to honour and not riches or hie blud.

2019 Marginal note in L: Exemplis of vertuus men and women. The Nine Nobles are Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus, Hector, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Boulogne (Christian hero of the First Crusade).

2024 Semiramis, Assyrian queen, whom Gower calls a whore (Confessio Amantis 5.1432-33), and Chaucer a wicked virago (CT 2.359; see also Fall of Princes 1.6632-43), but who is also famed for building a wall around Babylon (The Legend of Good Women 707), and is called "Most generous gem and floure of lovely favor" and "a mighty conqueror" in the Chaucerian poem "The Nine Ladies Worthy" (Utley 224-25); Tomyris, Scythian queen, vanquisher of Cyrus of Persia, of whose victory Lydgate says, "It is an horrour in maner for to thynke / So gret a prynce rebuked for to be / Off a woman" (Fall of Princes 2.3893-94), and who, together with Semiramis and others, is praised in the fifteenth-century English translation of Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus (Concerning Illustrious Women; Utley 219); Hippolyta, Amazon queen, defeated by Theseus (see lines 1195-96), praised in the aforementioned "Nine Ladies."

2025 Penthesileia (see line 341, note); although E's Medea may seem a likelier reading than L's Medus, L may be correct, Medusa having started off as "a creature in fayrenes above nature" who had "the most cunnynge in knowynge the tyllynge and plantynge of trees," and who was turned into a monster because she polluted the temple of Minerva (Boccaccio, De Claris Mulieribus 70-71); Xenobia, queen of Palmyra and conqueror of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, defeated by the Emperor Aurelian (The Monk's Tale, CT 7.2247-2734).

2027 Grig (Latinized by the fourteenth-century Scottish chronicler John of Fordun as Gregorius; 1.159-61, 2.149-52), king of Scots (878-89), reputedly victorious in Ireland and northern England; Kenneth Mac Alpin (reigned 843-50), who unified the kingdoms of the Picts and the Scots into one kingdom; Robert Bruce (king of Scots 1306-29), restorer of the independence of Scotland from England, and hero of John Barbour's epic Brus.

2031-43 Marginal note in L: Vicious people punyshed. Invye Pride, Ignorance, Disseyt.

2035-46 The displacement of sons of gentle birth by churlish upstarts and the corruption of morals among the nobility are topics of Dunbar's court satires ("This waverand warldis wretchidnes," 29-52; "Schir, yit remember," 11-25; "Complane I wald, wist I quhome till," 15-38; "Into this warld may none assure," 21-30).

2044 Marginal note in L: Dissate & craftynes ar haldyn wisdome now a dayes. verite & justice is callyt simplycitye & folyshnes.

2064 See note to 1879.

2086-76 Concerning trees that grow gems and barnacle geese reputed to be generated out of sodden driftwood or living trees, see Alexander Neckam's De naturis rerum and Mandeville's Travels. Such tales circulated widely as folklore in eastern Scotland in the late fifteenth century (Brown Travellers 26, 56-57; Documents 89-91, 155-56).

2089 As B notes, "such shock-awakenings are common in medieval dream poems" (The Parliament of Fowls 693-95; Dunbar's Goldyn Targe 238-46, "Thrissill and the Rois" 183-84, "Ane Dreme" 111-15, and "Fenyeit Freir" 125-26). Sometimes the shock involves entering water, as in Pearl 1157-70.

2090 Marginal note in L: The aucthour returnes frome his dreame to him self agane.

2106 fund. ME finden has a wealth of meanings, ranging from "to discover," "find," "ascertain," "judge" to "compose," "invent," "counterfeit," or "tell" (see MED's twenty-three separate entries, each with several shades of meaning). When the dreamer awakens in Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess he will "fonde to put this swevene in ryme" (1332; n.b. Chaucer's punning on the word in 1325, 1329). Here Douglas's dreamer yearns to remain in the country of poetic invention that he "fund" (found, invented) in his dream.

2116 Marginal note in L: A ballade in the commendation of honour & verteu.

2116-42 Internal rhyme is a technique of closure in Older Scots verse (Henryson, "Ane Prayer for the Pest," 65-88; Dunbar, "The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie" 233-48, 545-52, David Lindsay's Testament of the Papyngo 1179-85; also Dunbar's "Ballat of Our Lady" throughout); B notes that "the imagery has religious associations, several of the figures being traditionally applied to Christ or the Virgin; and Douglas frequently addresses Honour as if he were addressing God."

2150 The admission that one's work is rustic and crude is part of a traditional rhetorical strategy of affected modesty; usually, however, it occurs at the outset of a work (Curtius 411; CT 5.716-20).

2161-69 This is an amplification of the humility of Chaucer's envoy to Troilus and Criseyde (5.1786-92); see also The Kingis Quair 1352-65 and Goldyn Targe 271-79.

2167 stouth. B glosses stouth as a variant of stulth, "theft" (ON stuldar; compare stealth), the sense of this line belittling the poet's book thus being: "Thow art but pilfered materials. Theft loves light but little." But Douglas may be punning. Stouth is a legal term for "a customary rent" (MED stuth sb) which seems a fitting sense given the reference to quytcleme in the previous line. According to this reading Douglas says he has paid his dues by writing this poem, albeit small payment, "not worth a myte."