But their principal Art of all (he continues) is to cry up and bring unto patients such unworthy Physicians, who through covetousness do, or through meanness of parts, must comply with the Apothecaries lnterest; and such Practisers they extol and cry up for good Physicians; and such without doubt the whole Company will raise into fame and practice. But such as write only for the good of the Patient, and not for the benefit of the Apothecary they will endeavor to prevent their calling in, or shuffle out. Now this good Apothecaries Physician they describe by his frequent though needless visits, but especially the multitude of his Bills by his visiting twice a day or oftener (a very careful and painful Dr.) and by his writing new Medicines . . . making an Apothecaries Shop in the Patient's House, planting Cupboards and Windows with Glasses and Galley-Pots, and not a quarter of the whole made use of. He prescribes a medicine for every slight complaint, and never goes away from the Patient, or the Patient from him, without a Bill, for fear of the Apothecaries grumbling.50 Another author writing anonymously quite agrees with Dr. Merritt. He brings from observation still further charges:

Physicians all, or most prescribe their Bills in terms so obscure that they force all chance patients to repair to their own Apothecaries, pretending a particular secret, which only they have the key to unlock; whereas in effect it's no other than the commonest of Medicines, disguised under an unusual name, on design to direct you to an Apothecary, between whom and the Physician there is a private compact of going snips. The consequence

hereof as to your particular patient is a double fraud; and as to Apothecaries in general, their number bearing the proportion of at least ten parts to one of noted Physicians, to whom allowing each his Covenant Apothecary, who constituting but one part of the ten, the remaining nine parts of the number are compelled either to sit still or to Quack for a Livelyhood. . . . All Accomplished Physicians are likewise exposed to the manifest injuries from those Covenant Apothecaries, who being sent for by the Patients, after a short essay of a Cordial will overpower them by persuasions to call in a Doctor who shall be no other than his Covenant Physician, by which means the former Physician shall be passed by. And should it happen, the sense of gradtitude of the Patient should engage him to continue the use of his former Physician, yet this Covenant Apothecary shall privately cavil at every Bill and impute the appearance of every small pain. to his ill address in the Art of Physick, and shall not give over before he hath introduced his Covenanteer, whose authority in the fraud of a Physick Bill he supposes to be most necessary.51

This anatomy of seventeenth century abuses doubtless describes more or less accurately the relations existing between Chaucer's Doctor, perhaps such an "Apothecaries Physician," and his chemists, "Covenant Apothecaries." The Doctor's prosperity

50 Christopher Merritt, A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries, London, 1669, pp. 14-15. See also Lex Talionis, or a Short Reply to Dr. Merritt's Books, London, 1660, pp. 7 ff.; A Discourse Setting forth the Unhappy Condition of the Practice of Physick in London, London, 1670, by Jonathan Goddard; Merritt, Self-Conviction, London, 1670, and A Short Reply to the Postscript, 1670; the anonymous Medice cura Teipsum, 1671; Robert Pitt, The Frauds and Villanies of the Common Practice of Physick, London, 1705.

51 The Accomplisht Physician, the Honest Apothecary, and the Skilful Surgeon, London, 1670, pp. 74-75.

witnesses to the success of their "private compact of going snips" -and their friendship is of long standing.

And finally, Chaucer suggests that his good Doctor so loves gold that he is inclined to prescribe aurum potabile upon every convenient occasion, not necessarily for the good of the patient (though "gold in physick is a cordial '52) but because a little of it greatly increases the price of the medicine. Dr. Merritt notes a like practice in his day: "To advance the prices, you shall hardly ever see a Bill without Bezoar or Pearls in it, to make people think them very chargeable; whereas sometimes there is not above a grain or two of these dear ingredients in it, and a few grains of these or Ambergrise doubles or trebles the price of the Medicines, and are sure never to be omitted in their Bills, besides the gilding of the Pills, and covering their Boluses and Electuaries with gold (which have only an imaginary and no real use in Medicines so used) much inhanseth their prices, and a rich Cordial inserted exceedingly advanceth most of their Bills.''53 So by gilding his cheap pills and charging high prices for them, by covering the electuaries* received from his Covenant Apothecaries with a film of gold, and by putting a few drops of aurum potabile into his cordials, Chaucer's Doctor is provided with such wealth that he is able to make a pilgrimage to Canterbury arrayed in clothes of a blood-red and blueish-grey color lined with taffeta and thin silk. He is, we may presume, the complete fourteenth century physician.

Thus Chaucer's Doctor of Phisyk is, as we have seen, a curious compound of contradictory elements, which make his character second only to that of the Wife of Bath55 in complexity. He acknowledges that he is acquainted with the works of sundry great medical authorities of ancient times, but one might suspect that the medical treatises with which he is thoroughly familiar are perhaps as mythical as those of the old Esculapius; he is grounded in astrology, but it is to be feared that his observance

52 In a later paper I wish to discuss fully gold as an ingredient of medical compounds.

53 Op. cit., p. 17.

54 On the compounding of electuaries, see Arnoldus de Villa Nova, Opera omnia, Basileae, 1524, p. 463; Constantinus Africanus, op. cit., pp. 202, 2704; Haly filius Abbas, op. cit., lib. X, cap. vii, viii.

55 See my study, " "More About Chaucer's Wife of Bath," PMLA, XXXVII, pp. 30-51.

of "hours" and his astrological images are potent somewhat less because they contain the power of the stars than because he knows how to play upon human credulity; he may possibly understand all about alchemy and the Elixir of Life, but one doubts whether the gilding of his pills and electuaries is meant to be as powerful in working cures as in transmuting the base metal in his purse into pure gold; perhaps his pleasant association with his apothecaries is so much in the nature of a closed corporation that patients are practically excluded from sharing in the profits; he may be a pious man who has no time for reading the Bible or a rank materialist who contemns religion-we are not sure. In fact, we are not quite sure about anything in the Doctor's character. Chaucer has created him so. And it is this very uncertainty as to his honesty, his honor, his learning, and his sincerity which lends a certain life-like complexity to his character and actions; it is this human contradictoriness which the authordoubtless with much twinkling of eyes and thrusting of tongue in cheek-seizes upon and develops by suggestion. The result is not merely a description but a work of art-that very human and complex Doctor of Phisyk himself.

ODYSSEY, SEVENTH BOOK, AS KNOWN TO

PETRARCH

By ALBERT STANBURROUGH COOK
Yale University

Some one has said that, for sustained beauty, the Seventh and Eighth Books of the Odyssey are incomparable in all literature. However that may be, it is a curious and perhaps not wholly unimportant fact that Petrarch, who was the possessor of a complete Latin translation of the Odyssey by 1367,1 and who died in 1374, found time in this interval to draw upon the Seventh Book in the composition of one of his moral treatises, and in his Latin translation of Boccaccio's tale of Griselda. The moral treatise is that On the Avoidance of Avarice, in which he uses as illustrations the various articles fashioned of gold which Ulysses views in the palace of Alcinous.

In 1354 Petrarch acquired a manuscript of Homer in the original, but his ignorance of Greek was such that he could make

1 Nolhac, Pétrarque et l'Humanisme, 2d ed., Vol. II, p. 165 (cf. 164). Petrarch paid for the translation of Homer (Nolhac, pp. 162-3), as well as for the transcription, illumination, binding, etc. Thus he writes in his copy of the Latin Iliad, sent to him, it appears, in 1365 (Nolhac, pp. 164, 166): Domi scriptus, Patavi ceptus, Ticini perfectus, Mediolani illuminatus, et ligatus anno 1369," the illumination having been carried on while he was in attendance on the lords of Milan in 1368 for the wedding of Violante Visconti to Prince Lionel of England (cf. Cook, "The Last Months of Chaucer's Earliest Patron," Trans. Conn. Acad. of Arts and Sciences, Vol. XXI, pp. 74 ff.; Nolhac, Vol. II, p. 166; Vol. I, p. 118. As for the credit due to Petrarch for the translation of Homer, Nolhac has given a definite opinion. Thus in Vol. I, p. 21: "La traduction qu'il en fit faire, de concert avec Boccace, quelque informe qu'elle paraisse, n'en a pas moins révélé à ces deux précurseurs de l'hellénisme, et aussi aux premières générations de la Renaissance, le monde poétique d'Homère." Cf. Vol. II, p. 163: "Il n'y a donc pas contradiction entre les deux amis: l'un [Boccaccio] a acquis, de ses deniers, le premier manuscrit d'Homère qui soit venu à Florence; l'autre [Petrarch] a donné à Léon Pilate la rémunération nécessaire pour le travail exécuté à l'aide de ce manuscrit." Nolhac's opinion rests upon a passage in Petrarch's Sen. 16 (15).1, which he quotes in Vol. II, p. 162: Unde Ciceronem exspectabam habui Homerum, quique græcus ad mea venit mea opera et impensa factus est latinus, et nunc inter latinos volens mecum habitat."

2 Sen. 6. 8: Opera, 1581, p. 550.

3 Od. 7. 88 ff.

4 Nolhac, Vol. II, p. 132.

nothing of it.5 Nevertheless, his enthusiasm prompted him to write: "I am delighted with the aspect of Homer; and, as often as I embrace the silent volume, I exclaim with a sigh, Illustrious bard, with what pleasure should I listen to thy song if my sense of hearing were not obstructed!''

The manuscript in question was presented to him by Nicolas Sigeros, envoy of the Greek emperor to the West, on his return to Constantinople. In 1426 it was in the library of Pavia, entered under the title: "Homeri Yllias in mediocri volumine scriptus in papiro in littera greca. Sig. cccxxxv," the Odyssey being included under this heading. In August, 1439, the volume was lent to Pier Candido Decembri from the Pavia library." The original from which the translation for Petrarch was made was quite another codex. This is probably one concerning which Petrarch wrote to Boccaccio on Aug. 18, 1364, to the effect that he knew of a Homer at Padua, which he could doubtless purchase, though it was inferior to the one he had himself obtained from Sigeros. Boccaccio seems to have acquired it soon after, for we find Pilatus engaged upon it in Florence by October, 1360.8

The personality of the translator is thus described by Gibbon (ed. Bury, Vol. VII, pp. 120-1) :

In the year one thousand three hundred and sixty, a disciple of Barlaam, whose name was Leo or Leontius Pilatus, was detained in his way to Avignon by the advice and hospitality of Boccace, who lodged the stranger in his house, prevailed on the republic of Florence to allow him an annual stipend, and devoted his leisure to the first Greek professor who taught the language in the Western countries of Europe. The appearance of Leo might disgust the most eager disciple: he was clothed in the mantle of a philosopher, or a mendicant; his countenance was hideous; his face was overshadowed with black hair; his beard long and uncombed; his deportment rustic; his temper gloomy and inconstant; nor could he grace his discourse with the ornaments or even the perspicacity of Latin eloquence. In his passage, Petrarch entertained him at Padua a short time; he enjoyed the scholar, but was justly offended with the gloomy and unsocial temper of the man.9

5 He was acquainted with the first-century Homerus Latinus, an abstract in 1075 (1070) hexameters, of which half are concerned with Books I to V of the Iliad (Nolhac, Vol. II, pp. 131, 239).

6 Fam. 9.2, in Gibbon's translation (ed. Bury, Vol. VII, p. 120).

7 Nolhac, Vol. II, p. 132; Vol. I, pp. 101-2.

8 Nolhac, Vol. II, pp. 159-60, and Boccaccio's statement (ibid., p. 162). 9 For other accounts of Pilatus, see Hodius (Hody), De Græcis Illustribus, London, 1742, pp. 2-11; De Sade, Mémoires pour la Vie de Pétrarque, Vol. III, pp. 625-6, 632-4, 670-3; Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des Classischen Altertums, 3d ed., Vol. II, pp. 109-112; Körting, Petrarca's Leben und Werke, pp. 474 ff.; Hortis, Studj sulle Opere Latine del Boccaccio, pp. 502