1. Wordsworth translated the poem, although he never printed it. It seems some of his friends objected to its morality, objections which Wordsworth did not share. He defended the poem in a letter as follows: “The main lesson, and the most important one, is inculcated as a Poet ought to inculcate his lessons, not formally, but by implication; as when Phoebus in a transport of passion slays a wife whom he loved so dearly. How could the mischief of telling truth, merely because itis truth, be more feelingly exemplified?” (The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, Oxford, 1947, IV, 471).
2. James A. Work, “The Manciple's Tale” inSources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, ed. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, Chicago, 1941, p. 700.
3. References toThe Manciple's Tale, and other works of Chaucer are to F. N. Robinson,The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, second ed., Cambridge, Mass., pp. 225ff.
4. J. Burke Severs, “Is theManciple's Tale a Success?”,JEGP, 51 (1952), 1–16.
5. “The formal prosing at the end and the selfishness that pervades it flows from the genius of Chaucer, mainly as characteristic of the narrator whom he describes in the Prologue as eminent for shrewdness and clever worldly Prudence” (Poetical Works, IV, 471).