likely enough that he picked up most of these quotations at second hand. There are about a dozen quotations from Cicero, mostly from the De Officiis and De Amicitia, but I doubt whether he had read either of these books. In the Confessio Amantis he speaks as if he did not know that Tullius was the same person as Cicero (iv. 2648). Boethius is cited four times, one of the references being false; Cassiodorus and Isidore each four times, and Bede three times. Stories of natural history seem to be referred rather indiscriminately to Solinus, for several of these references prove to be false. Three quotations are attributed by the author to Horace (‘Orace’), but of these one is in fact from Ovid and another from Juvenal. He certainly got them all from some book of commonplaces. The same may be said of the passage alleged to be from Quintilian and of the references to Aristotle and to Plato. ‘Marcial,’ who is quoted three times, is not the classical Martial, but the epigrammatist Godfrey of Winchester, whose writings were in imitation of the Roman poet and passed commonly under his name. The distichs of Cato are referred to five times, and it is certain of course that Gower had read them. Ovid is named only once, and that is a doubtful reference, but the author of the Confessio Amantis was certainly well acquainted at least with the Metamorphoses and the Heroides. Valerius Maximus is the authority for two stories, but it is doubtful whether he is quoted at first hand. Fulgentius is cited twice, and ‘Alphonses,’[Pg lviii] that is Petrus Alphonsi, author of the Disciplina Clericalis, twice. ‘Pamphilius’ (i.e. Pamphilus, de Amore) is cited once, but not in such a way as to suggest that Gower knew the book itself; and so too Maximian, but the passage referred to does not seem to be in the Elegies. The quotation from Ptolemy is, as usual, from the maxims often prefixed in manuscripts to the Almagest. Other writers referred to are Chrysostom, Cyprian, Remigius, Albertus Magnus, Hélinand, Haymo, and Gilbert. We know from a passage in the Confessio Amantis that Gower had read some of the works of Albertus, and we may assume as probable that he knew Gilbert’s Opusculum de Virginitate, for his reference is rather to the treatise generally than to any particular passage of it.

Quotations.

[Pg lvii]

[Pg lviii]

He was acquainted, no doubt, with the Legenda Aurea or some similar collection, and he seems to refer also to the Vitae Patrum. The moral and devotional books of his own day must have been pretty well known to him, as well as the lighter literature, to which he had himself 

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