ters in deciding authorship, as critics disagree about them.]

[Footnote 549: Value his memory, etc. The Greeks, in appreciation of
the value of memory to the poet, represented the Muses as the
daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory.]

[Footnote 550: Homer. A Greek poet to whom is assigned the authorship
of the two greatest Greek poems, the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_; he is
said to have lived about a thousand years before Christ.]

[Footnote 551: Chaucer. (See note 33.)]

[Footnote 552: Saadi. A Persian poet, supposed to have lived in the
thirteenth century. His best known poems are his odes.]

[Footnote 553: Presenting Thebes, etc. This quotation is from Milton's
poem, _Il Penseroso_. Milton here names the three most popular
subjects of Greek tragedy,--the story of Oedipus, the ill-fated King
of Thebes who slew his father; the tale of the descendants of Pelops,
King of Pisa, who seemed born to woe--Agamemnon was one of his
grandsons; the third subject was the tale of Troy and the heroes of
the Trojan war,--called "divine" because the Greeks represented even
the gods as taking part in the contest.]

[Footnote 554: Pope. (See note 88.)]

[Footnote 555: Dryden. (See note 35.)]

[Footnote 556: Chaucer is a huge borrower. Taine, the French critic,
says on this subject: "Chaucer was capable of seeking out in the old
common forest of the Middle Ages, stories and legends, to replant them
in his own soil and make them send out new shoots.... He has the right
and power of copying and translating because by dint of retouching he
impresses ... his original work. He recreates what he imitates."]

[Footnote 557: Lydgate. John Lydgate was an English poet who lived a
generation later than Chaucer; in his _Troy Book_ and other poems he
probably borrowed from the sources used by Chaucer; he called himself
"Chaucer's disciple."]

[Footnote 558: Caxton. William Caxton, the English author, more famous
as the first English printer, was not born until after Chaucer's
death. The work from which Emerson supposes the poet to have borrowed
Caxton's translation of _Recueil des Histoires de Troye_, the first
printed English book, appeared about 1474.]

[Footnote 559: Guido di Colonna. A Sicilian poet and historian of the
thirteenth century. Chaucer in his _House of Fame_ placed in his
vision "on a pillar higher than the rest, Homer and Livy, Dares the
Phrygian, Guido Colonna, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the other
historians of the