Page:Stories from Old English Poetry-1899.djvu/63



HERE are some stories which may be called the world’s property, since no one can find who told them first, or in what language they were first written. One of these old tales, which is found far back in English poetry, I am going now to tell you. Chaucer relates it in some of his loveliest verse, but he does not claim it as his own, and confesses that he got the story from a worthy clerk in Padua, called Francis Petrarch, whose

And since Chaucer, many another poet has taken up this tale. Three friends of Shakespeare, named Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton, made the same tender story into a heart-breaking drama; and since their day, in many a different form, it has appeared in literature. But I have not yet told you its name. It is the story of

Many years ago, in a lovely country of Italy, shut in by Alpine mountains, there lived a noble