Note 131 — IV. ORIGINALITY AND INFLUENCE

In this play the French tais-toi is written tétoi. In an age of few books such phonetic spelling must have been common. It has been suggested that the vair (grey) of early French poetry was mistaken for vert (green). The green eyes of the heroines in Portuguese literature from the Cancioneiro da Vaticana to Almeida Garrett would thus be based not on reality but, like Cinderella's glass slippers, on a confusion of homonyms (see Alfred Jeanroy, Origines de la poésie lyrique en France, p. 329).