the favourite manuals of the Middle Ages, and a treasure-house
of religious wisdom to centuries of English writers. "Boice of
Consolacioun" is cited in the "Romaunt of the Rose"; and the list of
passages imitated by Chaucer from the martyr of Catholic orthodoxy and
Roman freedom of speech is exceedingly long. Among them are the
ever-recurring diatribe against the fickleness of fortune, and (through
the medium of Dante) the reflection on the distinction between gentle
birth and a gentle life. Chaucer's translation was not made at
second-hand; if not always easy it is conscientious, and interpolated
with numerous glosses and explanations thought necessary by the
translator. The metre of "The Former Life" he at one time or another
turned into verse of his own.

Perhaps the most interesting of the quotations made in Chaucer's poems
from Boethus occurs in his "Troilus and Cressid," one of the many
medieval versions of an episode engrafted by the lively fancy of an
Anglo-Norman trouvere upon the deathless, and in its literary
variations incomparably luxuriant, growth of the story of Troy. On
Benoit de Sainte-Maure's poem Guido de Colonna founded his Latin-prose
romance; and this again, after being reproduced in languages and by
writers almost innumerable, served Boccaccio as the foundation of his
poem "Filostrato"--i.e. the victim of love. All these works, together
with Chaucer's "Troilus and Cressid," with Lydgate's "Troy-Book," with
Henryson's "Testament of Cressid" (and in a sense even with
Shakespere's drama on the theme of Chaucer's poem), may be said to
belong to the second cycle of modern versions of the tale of Troy
divine. Already their earlier predecessors had gone far astray from
Homer, of whom they only know by hearsay, relying for their facts on
late Latin epitomes, which freely mutilated and perverted the Homeric
narrative in favour of the Trojans--the supposed ancestors of half the
nations of Europe. Accordingly, Chaucer, in a well-known passage in
his "House of Fame," regrets, with sublime coolness, how "one said that
Homer" wrote "lies,"

Feigning in his poetries
And was to Greekes favourable.
Therefore held he it but fable.

But the courtly poets of the romantic age of literature went a step
further, and added a mediaeval colouring all their own. One converts
the Sibyl into a nun, and makes her admonish Aeneas to tell his beads.
Another--it is Chaucer's successor Lydgate--introduces Priam'