is dated in 1526, and was the first in which a collection of some other pieces of Chaucer was added to the Canterbury Tales.

"The next edition which I have been able to meet with was printed by Thomas Godfray in 1532. If this be not the very edition which Leland speaks of as printed by Berthelette, with the assistance of Mr. William Thynne, (as I rather suspect it is,) we may be assured that it was copied from that. Mr. Thynne's dedication to Henry VIII. stands at the head of it; and the great number of Chaucer's works never before published which appear in it, fully entitles it to the commendations which have always been given to Mr. Thynne's edition on that account. Accordingly it was several times reprinted as the standard edition of Chaucer's works, without any material alteration, except the insertion of the Plowman's tale in 1542.

"As my business here is solely with the Canterbury Tales, I shall take no notice of the several miscellaneous pieces, by Chaucer and others, which were added to them by Mr. Thynne in his edition, and afterwards by Stowe and Speght in the editions of 1561, 1597, and 1602. With respect to the Canterbury Tales I am under a necessity of observing, that upon the whole they received no advantage from the edition of 1532. Its material variations from Caxton's second edition are all, I think, for the worse. It confounds the order of the Squier's and the Frankelein's tales, which Caxton, in his second edition, had set right. It gives the Frankelein's prologue to the Merchant, in addition to his own proper prologue. It produces for the first time two prologues, the one to the Doctour's, and the other to the Shipman's tale, which are both evidently spurious; and it brings back the lines of ribaldry in the Merchant's tale, which Caxton, in his second edition, had rejected upon the authority of his good Ms.

"However, this edition of 1532, with all its imperfections, had the luck, as I have said, to be considered as the standard edition, and to be copied, not only by the booksellers, in their several editions* of 1542, 1546, 1555, and 1561, but also by Mr. Speght, (the first editor in form, after Mr. Thynne, who set his name to his work,) in 1597 and 1602. In the dedication to Sir Robert Cecil, prefixed to this last edition, he speaks indeed of having 'reformed the whole work, both by old written copies and by Ma. William Thynnes praiseworthy labours;' but I cannot find that he has departed in any material point from those editions, which I have supposed to be derived from Mr. Thynne's. In the very material points above mentioned, in which those editions vary from Caxton's second, he has followed them. Nor have I observed any such verbal varieties as would induce one to believe that he had consulted any good Ms. They who have read his preface will probably not regret that he did not do more towards correcting the text of Chaucer.

"In this state the Canterbury Tales remained† till the edition undertaken by Mr. Urry, which was published, some years after his death, in 1721. I shall say but little of that

But in Mr. West's copy nothing followed. The Mr. Speght's edition was reprinted in 1687, with writer of the preface to Ed. Urr. seems to have had the use of a copy of this edition in 1526, which contained some other pieces of Chaucer's, and several by other hands. See the preface to Ed. Urr."

an advertisement at the end, in which the editor pretended to publish from a Ms. the conclusion of the Coke's Tale, and also of the Squires Tale, which in the printed books are said to be lost or never * "There are some other editions mentioned by finished by the author. These conclusions may be Ames, without date; but it is probable that, upon seen in the Preface to Ed. Urr. Whoever the inspection, they would appear to be one or other of editor was, I must do him the justice to say, that the editions whose dates are here given. It seems they are both really to be found in Ms. The first to have been usual to print books in partnership, is to be found in Ms. B. a. and the other in Ms. B. d. and for each partner to print his own name to his from which Hearne has also printed it, as a choice share of the impression. See Ames, p. 252. A discovery, in his letter to Bagford. App. to R. G. Bible is said to be printed in 1551, by Nicholas Hill-'at the cost and charges of certayne honest menne of the occupacyon, whose names be upon their bokes.'"

"It may be proper just to take notice, that

p. 601. If I thought the reader had any relish for such supplements to Chaucer, I could treat him from Ms. B. a. with at least thirty more lines, which have been inserted in different parts of the Cook's Tale, by the same hand that wrote this Conclusion."

edition, as a very fair and full account of it is to be seen in the modest and sensible preface prefixed to it by Mr. Timothy Thomas, upon whom the charge of publishing Chaucer devolved, or rather was imposed, after Mr. Urry's death. The strange license in which Mr. Urry appears to have indulged himself, of lengthening and shortening Chaucer's words according to his own fancy, and of even adding words of his own, without giving his readers the least notice, has made the text of Chaucer in his edition by far the worst that was ever published."

PLAN OF THE PRESENT EDITION.

During the latter half of the twelfth century and the earlier part of the thirteenth, the language spoken by our Saxon forefathers was rapidly breaking up, and losing its original grammatical inflections, and much of its characteristic phraseology. Books or songs written in English during this period were intended for the edification of the lower classes, or for the bourgeoisie, which still retained its Saxon habits. Great changes in language are generally coeval with political movements and convulsions, and the character of our language was completely changed by the baronial wars of the thirteenth century, which brought into prominence the Anglo-Saxon portion of the population, and made its language fashionable in high society. The consequence was, that it went through further changes in form, and became largely mixed with words having a French (or AngloNorman) origin. About the end of the reign of Edward I. the English language took a definite shape, which continued during the fourteenth century with very little alteration in its grammatical forms, and the only alterations in other respects arising from words becoming obsolete, and from the facility with which French or Anglo-Norman words were adopted or received at the will of the author, and according to the class of society in which he moved and for which he wrote. This arose from the circumstance that English and the form of French spoken here were co-existent in our island as the languages of common life. This form of the English language was that of the author of Piers Ploughman and of Geoffrey Chaucer; the former representing the popular feelings and containing fewest French words, while Chaucer, as the poet of the higher society, uses French words in much greater abundance. In our language of the present day we have lost as much of the English of Piers Ploughman as we have of the French of the Canterbury Tales.

The general character and the grammatical constructions of the English of the fourteenth century were preserved during the opening years of the fifteenth; but they soon began to break up more rapidly even than in the thirteenth century, until, at the time of the Reformation, our language took nearly its modern form, the orthography excepted.

The language in which any man wrote could only be preserved correctly in manuscripts written in his own time, or very near it; for we find by experience that copyists invariably altered what they copied to the form of the language at the time in which they wrote, and, which is still more embarrassing, to the local dialect of the county in which they lived. It is evident, therefore, that the plan of forming the text of any work of the periods of which we are speaking, from a number of different manuscripts, written at different times and different places, is the most absurd plan which it is possible to conceive. Yet this was the method professedly followed by Tyrwhitt, in forming a text of the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. He even did worse: for he seems to have taken for his foundation merely one of the old editions, printed at a time when all the grammatical forms were lost, changing words or lines for others which pleased him better from any manuscript which happened to contain them. It is true that he has given a list of manuscripts, in which he points out those which he considers the best, and which he followed in preference to others; but Tyrwhitt was so entirely unacquainted with the palæographical and philological knowledge necessary for the appreciation of them, that he places among his manuscripts of "highest authority," copies on paper of the latter part of the fifteenth century, while excellent manuscripts of an earlier date are looked upon with indifference. The more caution is necessary in this respect with the text of Chaucer, because the greater

number of the manuscripts are of the latter part or middle of the fifteenth century, when the language was very much changed from that of Chaucer's time.

Tyrwhitt's entire ignorance of the grammar of the language of Chaucer is exhibited in almost every line, few of which could possibly have been written by the poet as he has printed them. It need only be stated, as an instance of this, that in the preterites of what the modern Teutonic philologists term the strong verbs (which our common grammarians distinguish by the unfortunate title of irregular verbs), Tyrwhitt has invariably placed a verb in the plural with a noun in the singular. This is explained by the circumstance that, in our modern form of the language, the ancient plural of the preterite has been adopted for singular as well as plural. Examples of this (in the verbs to bear, of which the correct forms were, sing. bar, pl. bare; to come, s. cam, pl. come; to swear, s. swor, pl. swore; to give, s. gaf, pl. gave; to speak, s. spak, pl. spake; to rise, s. ros, roos, pl. rose; to take, s. took, pl. toke; &c.) occur almost in every sentence. In the verb to sit, of which the pret. s. and pl. was sette, Tyrwhitt has substituted set, a form which did not exist; and in the same manner, in the verb to creep, he has given pret. s. crept, when the forms were s. creep, crope, pl. crope. In the same manner, Tyrwhitt has in most instances substituted the plural of adjectives for the singular, and the inflected cases of nouns for the nominative, besides an infinity of errors in the orthographical forms of the language.

Under these circumstances it is clear that, to form a satisfactory text of Chaucer, we must give up the printed editions, and fall back upon the manuscripts; and that, instead of bundling them all together, we must pick out one best manuscript which also is one of those nearest to Chaucer's time. The latter circumstance is absolutely necessary, if we would reproduce the language and versification of the author. At the same time, it cannot but be acknowledged, that the earliest manuscript might possibly be very incorrect and incomplete, from the ignorance or negligence of the scribe who copied it. This, however, is fortunately not the case with regard to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

The Harleian manuscript, No. 7334, is by far the best manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that I have yet examined, in regard both to antiquity and correctness. The handwriting is one which would at first sight be taken by an experienced scholar for that of the latter part of the fourteenth century, and it must have been written within a few years after 1400, and therefore soon after Chaucer's death and the publication of the Canterbury Tales. Its language has very little, if any, appearance of local dialect; and the text is in general extremely good, the variations from Tyrwhitt being usually for the better. Tyrwhitt appears not to have made much use of this manuscript, and he has not even classed it among those to which most credit is due.

This manuscript I have adopted as the text of the present edition; the alterations I have ventured to make in it being comparatively few, and only such as appeared absolutely necessary. I hardly need inform those who are in the habit of consulting medieval manuscripts in whatever language they may be written, that none of them are clerically accurate. Some of them are literally filled with errors, which it requires very little knowledge to perceive and correct. Many errors of this kind are found in the Harleian manuscript of the Canterbury Tales of which I am speaking, and I have not felt the least hesitation in correcting them by comparison with another manuscript. As an example of the kind of error to which I allude, it may be stated that Il. 3779, 3780 stand thus in the Ms. :

"Of storial thing that toucheth gentilesse,
And eek more ryalté, and holynesse."

I have without hesitation followed another Ms. in correcting the two words in italics to moralité; and in cases like this I have not thought it necessary to load the book with notes pointing out the alterations. In other instances, where a reading in the Harl. Ms., although affording a tolerable meaning, has appeared to me a decided bad one, I have

changed it for a better, always (when there is room for the least doubt) giving the original reading of the manuscript in a foot-note. For this purpose, I have collated the text throughout with the Lansdowne Ms. No. 851, which appears to be, of those in the British Museum, next in antiquity and value to the Ms. Harl.; and I have also collated it, as far as the Wyf of Bathes Tale, with two manuscripts in the public library of the University of Cambridge, bearing the shelf-marks Mm. 2. 5. (which I have quoted as C. 1), and Ii. 3, 26 (C. 2); but I found so little real use from these latter manuscripts, that I thought it unnecessary to collate them further. In general, I have reaped little advantage from collating a number of manuscripts.

Tyrwhitt's want of philological knowledge has rendered his text unharmonious as well as ungrammatical. The final e, most distinctly pronounced, and which was most necessary to the metrical completeness of the line, was the one which marked grammatical inflections and adverbial forms; and this he has constantly dropped, and he has therefore printed an imperfect line, or given it supposed perfection by adding a word or placing a final e to a word which ought not to have it. I may observe, that it was a constant rule to elide the final e in pronunciation, when it preceded a word beginning with a vowel or with the letter h, and that this was the source of frequent errors of the scribes, who, pronouncing the lines as they copied them, omitted sometimes to write the letter which they did not pronounce, and thus made a grammatical error, which, however, every reader at the time could see and correct. Instances of this kind of error are not of unfrequent occurrence in the Harl. Ms. of the Canterbury Tales; but I have resisted the temptation to correct them, because it appeared to me dangerous, in our present knowledge of medieval English, to presume too far on our acquaintance with every nicety of the grammar of the fourteenth century. In many cases, however, these are certainly errors. Thus, in 1. 5911:

"Have thou ynough, what thar the recch or care."

We ought to read recche, which is the infinitive of the verb. For the same reason, in 1. 6128,"And for to walk in March, Averil, and May,"

we should read walke. In both these instances the final e has been lost before a word beginning with a vowel. The older termination of the infinitive was in en, but the n was subsequently dropped, and during the fourteenth century, and earlier part of the fifteenth, the two terminations of the infinitive in en and e were used indiscriminately, at the will or caprice of the writer. In poetry before a word beginning with a consonant, it was immaterial which form was used, but before a word beginning with a vowel, or with h, the n might be dropt or retained accordingly as the final syllable of the word was required or not for the metre. In these cases the scribe has not unfrequently omitted the n when it ought to have been retained; but probably the thing was so well understood, that it mattered little how it was written, the reader using the n or not as the verse required it, whether he saw it in the manuscript or not.

With the exception of the cases above mentioned, I have reproduced the text of the Harleian Ms. with literal accuracy. My object has been to give Chaucer, as far as can be done, in his own language, which certainly has not yet been done in print. I doubt much if the different attempts at half or wholly modernising his language, which have been made in latter years, will ever render him popular; and his poetry is entirely lost in translations. Surely, when we remember the oft-repeated saying, that the trouble of learning Spanish is well repaid by the simple pleasure of reading Don Quixote in the original, we may well be allowed to wonder that any Englishman of taste should refuse the comparatively trifling labour of making himself acquainted with his own language of little more than four centuries ago, for the satisfaction of reading and understanding the poetry of his glorious countryman Geoffrey Chaucer. Changing and mutilating is not, in my opinion, the right way to make any thing popular; and in the present work my object

is not the mere production of a correct (or, at least, as correct as under all he circumstances can be expected) edition of the father of our poetry; I would try the experiment of making his writings popular by the very fact of their being correctly printed, and by the addition of popular (and not scholastic) notes-notes, the aim of which is to explain and illustrate, in a simple and unpretending manner, allusions and expressions which may not be generally known to those who are not in the habit of studying the documents and the antiquities of Chaucer's age. For this purpose, I avail myself of every thing within my reach. Although I have felt it necessary to speak unreservedly of the defects of Tyrwhitt's text-for which we must of course make some allowance in consideration of the low state of philological science, as far as it regarded the middle ages, in his time—yet it must be confessed to his credit that he entered upon his labours, in editing Chaucer, with zeal, and executed them with no small share of industry and research. His notes on the Canterbury Tales contain much that is useful and valuable, and this I have unscrupu-. lously transferred to my own edition, either in his own words or in an abridged form.