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1 “Curiosities of Literature,” Art. “History of New Words.”

2 These are political squibs thrown out by the mobocracy in the reign of Richard the Second. They are preserved in Mr. Turner’s “History of England.” I print them in their modern orthography. The first specimen runs in familiar rhymes:—

“Jack the Miller asked help to turn his mill aright. He hath ground small, small! The King’s son of Heaven he shall pay for all. Look thy Mill go aright with the four sails, and the post stand in steadfastness. With Right and with Might, with Skill and with Will, let Might help Right, and Skill go before Will, and Right before Might, then goes our Mill aright, and if Might go before Right, and Will before Skill, then is our Mill mis adyght.”

Now we have plain, intelligible prose—

“Jack Carter prays you all that ye make a good end of that ye have begun, and do well, and still better and better; for at the even men near the day. If the end be well, then is all well. Let Piers the ploughman dwell at home, and dyght us corn. Look that Hobbe the robber be well chastised. Stand manly together in truth, and help the truth, and truth shall help you.”

3 Sir Francis Palgrave’s “Rise and Progress of the English Common wealth;” Proofs and Illustrations, ccxiii.

4 This letter to the translator Hoby has been passed over by those who collected the few letters of the learned Cheke; and, what seems strange, appears only in the first edition of Hoby’s translation, having been omitted in the subsequent editions. Perhaps the translator was not enamoured of his excellent critic.

5 Sir Thomas Wilson’s “Arte of Rhetoric,” 1553.

6 Spenser’s protest against the Innovators of Language may be seen in his “Three Letters,” which are preserved unmutilated in Todd’s “Spenser;” they are deficient in Hughes’ edition.

7 Heylin’s “Observations on the Historie of the Reign of King Charles.” L’Estrange’s rejoinder may be found in the second edition of his History.

8 “Alvearie, or quadruple Dictionary of Four Languages,” 1580.

9 “The English Dictionary, or an Interpreter of Hard English Words,” by H. C., gent., 1658. The eleventh and twelfth editions are before me. The last, edited by another person, is not so copious as the former. In Cockram’s own edition we have a first “Book” of his “Hard Words,” followed by a second of what he calls “Vulgar Words,” which are English. The last editor has wholly omitted the second part. Of the first part, or the “Hard Words,” Cockram observes that “They are the choicest words now in use, and wherewith our language is enriched and become so copious, to which words the common sense is annexed.” [See note on this Dictionary, with some few specimens of its contents, in “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. iii.]

DIALECTS.

Dialects reflect the general language diversified by localities.

A dialect is a variation in the pronunciation, and necessarily in the orthography of words, or a peculiarity of phrase or idiom, usually accompanied by a tone which seems to be as local as the word it utters. It is a language rarely understood out of the sphere of the population by whom it is appropriated. A language is fixed in a nation by a flourishing metropolis of an extensive empire, a dialect may have existed coeval with that predominant dialect which by accident has become the standard or general language; and moreover, the contemned dialect may occasionally preserve some remains or fragments of the language which, apparently lost, but hence recovered, enable us rightly to understand even the prevalent idiom.

All nations have had dialects. Greece had them, as France, and Italy have them now. Homer could have included in a single verse four or five dialects; but though the Doric and the Ionic were held the most classical, none of them were barbarous, since their finest writers have composed in these several dialects. Even some Italian poets and comic writers have adopted a favourite dialect; but no classical English author could have immortalised any one of our own.

Ancient Greece, as Mitford describes, “though a narrow country, was very much divided by mountains and politics.” And mountains and politics, which impede the general intercourse of men, inevitably produce dialects. Each isolated state with fear or pride affected its independence, not only by its own customs, but by its accent or its phrase. In France the standard language was long but a dialect. There potent nobles, each holding a separate court and sovereignty in his own province, offered many central points of attraction. The Counts of Foix, of Provence and of Toulouse, and the Dukes of Guienne, of Normandy and of Brétagne, were all munificent patrons of those who cultivated what they termed “l’art du beau parler,” each in their provincial idiom. These were all subdivisions of the two rival dialects to which the Romane language had given birth. But the river Loire ran between them; and a great river has often been the boundary of a dialect: France was thus long divided. On the south of the Loire their speech was called the language of Oc, and on the north the language of Oil; names which they derived from the different manner of the inhabitants pronouncing the affirmative Oui. The language of the poetical Troubadours on the south of the Loire had not the happier destiny of its rival, used by the Trouvères on the north. It was this which became the standard language, while the other remains a dialect. Here we have a remarkable incident in the history of dialects in a great country; it was long doubtful which was to become the national language; and it has happened, if we may trust an enthusiast of Languedoc, that his idiom, expressing with more vowelly softness and naïveté the familiar emotions of love and friendship, and gaiety and bonhomie, gave way to a harsher idiom and a sharp nasal accent; and all ended by the Parisian detecting the provincials by their shibboleth, and calling them all alike Gascons, and their taste for exaggeration and rhodomontade gasconades; while the southerns, who hold that what is called the French language is only a perversion of their own dialect, like our former John Bull, fling on the Parisian the old Gaulish appellative of Franchiman.1

The dialects of England were produced by occurrences which have happened to no other nation. Our insular site has laid us open to so many masters, that it was long doubtful whether Britain would ever possess a uniform language. The aboriginal Britons left some of their words behind them in their flight, as the Romans had done in their dominion,2 and even the visiting Phœnician may have dropped some words on our coasts. The Jutes, the Angles, and the Saxons brought in a new language, and, arriving from separate localities, that language came to us diversified by dialects; and the Danes, too, joined the northern brotherhood of pirate-kings who planted themselves in our soil. The gradual predominance of the West-Saxon over the petty kingdoms which subdivided Britain first approached to the formation of a national language. The West-Saxon was the land of Alfred, and the royal cultivation of its dialect, supreme in purity as the realm stood in power, rendered it the standard language which we now call Anglo-Saxon.

“Had the Heptarchy (Octarchy) continued,” observed Bishop Percy, “our English language would probably have been as much distinguished for its dialects as the Greek, or at least as that of the several independent states of Italy.” In truth, we remained much in that condition while a power hostile to the national character assumed the sovereignty. So unsettled was the English language, that a writer at the close of the fourteenth century tells us that different parts of the island experienced a difficulty to understand one another. A diversity of pronunciation, as well as a diversity in the language, was so prevalent, that the Northern, the Southern, and the Middle-land men were unintelligible when they met; the Middle-land understood the Northern and the Southern better than the Northman and the Southman comprehended one another; the English people seemed to form an assemblage of distinct races. Even to this day, a scene almost similar might be exhibited. Should a peasant of the Yorkshire dales, and one from the vales of Taunton, and another from the hills of the Chiltern, meet together, they would require an interpreter to become intelligible to each other; but in this dilemma what county could produce the Englishman so versed in provincial dialects as to assist his three honest countrymen?

If etymology often furnishes a genealogy of words through all their authentic descents, so likewise a map of provincial idioms might be constructed to indicate the localities of the dialects. There we might observe how an expansive and lengthened river, or intervening fells and mountains which separate two counties, can stop the course of a dialect, so that the idiom current on one side, when it passes the borders becomes intrusive, little regarded, and ere it reaches a third county has expired in the passage. Thus the Parret, we are told, is the boundary of the Somersetshire dialect; for words used cast of the Parret are only known by synonyms on the west side. The same incident occurs in Italy, where a single river runs through the level plain; there the Piedmontese peasant from the western end meeting with a Venetian from the eastern could hold but little colloquial intercourse together; a Genoese would be absolutely unintelligible to both, for, according to their proverb, “Language was the gift of God, but the Genoese dialect was the invention of the devil.” In those rank dialects left to run to seed in their wild state, without any standard of literature, we hardly recognise the national idiom; the Italian language sprung from one common source—its maternal Latin; but this we might not suspect should we decide solely by its dialects: and we may equally wonder how some of our own could ever have been mangled and distorted out of the fair dimensions of the language of England.

All who speak a dialect contract a particular intonation which, almost as much as any local words, betrays their soil; these provincial tones are listened to from the cradle; and, as all dialects are of great antiquity, this sounding of the voice has been bequeathed from generation to generation.3 It is sometimes a low muttering in the throat, a thick guttural like the Welsh, or a shrill nasal twang, or a cadence or chant; centuries appear not to have varied the tone more than the vocable. The Romance of “Octavien Imperator,” which was written possibly earlier than the reign of Henry VI., is in the Hampshire dialect nearly as it is spoken now. The speech of a Yorkshireman is energetically described by our ancient Trevisa. “It is so sharpe, slytting, frotyng, and unshape, that we sothern men maye unneth understond that language.” As we advance in the North, the tones of the people are described as “round and sonorous, broad open vowels, and the richness and fulness of the diphthongs fill their mouths” with a firm, hardy speech.

A striking contrast is observable among those who by their secluded position have held little intercourse with their neighbours, and have contracted an overweening estimation of themselves, and a provincial pride in their customs, manners, and language. Norfolk, surrounded on three sides by the sea, remains unaltered to this day, and still designates as “Shiremen” all who are born out of Norfolk, not without “some little expression of contempt.” There is “a narrowness and tenuity in their pronunciation,” such as we may fancy—for it is but a fancy—would steal out of the lips of reserved, proudful men, and who, as their neighbours of Suffolk run their common talk into strange melancholy cadences, have characterised their peculiar intonation as “the Suffolk whine!” In Derbyshire the pronunciation is broad, and they change the G into K. The Lancashire folk speak quick and curt, omit letters, or sound three or four words all together; thus, I wou’didd’n, or I woudyedd’d, is a cacophony which stands for I wish you would! When the editor of a Devonshire dialect found that it was aspersed as the most uncouth jargon in England, he appealed to the Lancashire.4

But such vile rustic dissonance or mere balderdash concerns not our vernacular literature, though it seems that even such agrestic rubbish may have its utility in a provincial vocabulary; for the glossary to the “Exmoor language” was drawn up for the use of lawyers on the western circuit, who frequently mistook the evidence of a rustic witness for want of an interpretation of his words. Some ludicrous misconceptions of equivocal terms or some ridiculous phraseology have been recorded in other counties, among the judges and the bar at a county assize.

But it is among our provincial dialects that we discover many beautiful archaisms, scattered remnants of our language, which explain those obscurities of our more ancient writers, singularities of phrase, or lingual peculiarities, which have so often bewildered the most acute of our commentators. After all their voluminous research and their conjectural temerity, a villager in Devonshire or in Suffolk, and, more than either, the remoter native of the North Countree, with their common speech, might have recovered the baffled commentators from their agony. The corrections of modern editors have often been discovered to be only ingenious corruptions of their own whenever the original provincial idiom has started up.

These provincial modes of speech have often actually preserved for us the origin of English phraseology, and enlightened the philologist in a path unexplored. In one of the most original and most fanciful of the dramas of Ben Jonson, “The Sad Shepherd,” the poet designed to appropriate a provincial dialect to the Witch Maudlin’s family. He had consulted Lacy the comedian, who was a native of Yorkshire, respecting the northern phraseology. Unfortunately, this drama was never finished; and the consequence is, that the dialects are incorrectly given, and are worsened by the orthography of the printer. Yet it was from this imperfect attempt to convey some notion of our dialects that Horne Tooke was able to elucidate one of his grammatical discoveries, in regard to the conjunction if, which, from “The Sad Shepherd,” is demonstrated to be anciently the imperative of the verb gif, or give. Thus it was, by apparently very rude dialects, this famous philologist was enabled to substantiate beyond doubt a signification which had occurred to no one but himself.5

A language in the progress of its refinement loses as well as gains in the amount of words, and the good fortune of expressive phrases. Some become equivocal by changing their signification, and some fall obsolete, one cannot tell why, for custom or caprice arbitrate, guided by no law, and often with an unmusical ear. These discarded but faithful servants, now treated as outcasts, and not even suspected to have any habitation, are safely lodged in some of our dialects. As the people are faithful traditionists, repeating the words of their forefathers, and are the longest to preserve their customs, they are the most certain antiquaries; and their oral knowledge and their ancient observances often elucidate many an archæological obscurity. Hence, two remarkable consequences have been discovered in the history of our popular idioms; many words and phrases used in the land of Cockney, now deemed not only vulgar but ungrammatical, are in fact not corruptions of the native tongue, but the remains of what was anciently at different periods the established national dialect.6 This transmitted language descended to the humbler classes, unimpaired and unaugmented, through a long line of ancestry. Again, it is often probable that the provincial word which in its pronunciation merely reverses the order of the letters, as now uttered, and which is only heard from the mouths of the people, may convey the original spoken sound, and be the genuine English. Are we quite sure that the polishers may not often have been the corrupters of our language? Nor let us be positive that the metropolitan taste has always fixed on the most felicitous or the most forcible of our idiomatic words or phrases, since we may discover some lingering among our provincial dialects which should never have been dismissed, and which claim to be restored. When Johnson compiled his “Dictionary,” he was not aware of the authentic antiquity of our dialectic terms and phrases. Our literary antiquities had not yet engaged the attention of general scholars. Provincialisms were not deemed by the legislator of our language legitimate words; he did not recognise their primitive claims, nor their relative affinities, but ejected them as vagabonds. But words are not barbarous nor obsolete because no longer used in our written composition, since some of the most exquisite and picturesque, which have ceased to enrich our writings, live in immortal pages. After the issue of Johnson’s great labour, our national literature began to attract the studies of literary men, who soon perceived how this neglected but existing stock of idiomatic English in our provincialisms more certainly explained our elder writers in verse and prose. Amid the murmurs raised by the archæologists, Ash attempted to supply the palpable deficiency of Johnson; but the matter was too abundant, and his space too contracted. In vain he attempted his “Supplement;” all the counties in England seemed to rise against the luckless glossarist; but notwithstanding its limited utility, his vocabulary was often preferred for its copiousness to the more elaborate lexicon. The spirit of inquiry was now abroad after the “winged words;” and ingenious persons, within these twenty years,7 have produced a number of provincial glossaries; but several are still wanting, particularly those of Kent, and Sussex, and Hampshire. All these glossaries collected together might form a provincial lexicon marking each county. A few might be allowed to enter into the great dictionary of the English language; but that would not be their safest place, for they would then lie at the mercy of successive editors, who would not always discern a precious archaism amid the baseness and corruption of language. The origin, the nature, and the history of our provincial idioms have yet never been investigated, though the subject, freed from its mere barbarisms, opens a diversified field to the philosopher, the antiquary, and the philologist.

Grose, who wrote in 1785, notices the state of those counties which were remote from the metropolis, or which had no immediate intercourse with it before “newspapers and stage-coaches imported scepticism, and made every ploughman and thresher a politician and a freethinker.” The accelerated intercourse of the people has long passed beyond the diurnal folio and the evanescent stage-coach, and in a century of railroads and national schools the provincial glossary will finally vanish away.

1 “Dictionnaire Languédocien-françois,” par l’Abbé de Sauvages. “Franchiman est formé de l’Allemand, et signifie homme de France.” The Abbé wrote in 1756, when he did not care to translate too literally; the Frank-man meant the Free man, for the Franks called themselves so, as “the free people.” This learned Gascon, in his zeal for the Langue d’oc, explains, “Parla Franchiman,” means “parler avec l’accent (bon ou mauvais) des provinces du nord du royaume:” an insinuation that the French accent might not be positively the better one. The good Abbé had such a perfect conviction of the superiority of his Languedocians, that he would have no other servants not only for their superior integrity, but for that of their language.

2 “Palgrave,” 174. They also received some in exchange, many words in Cæsar being British.—Hearne’s “Leland’s Itinerary,” vi.

3 In that very curious “Logonomia Anglica” of the learned Alexander Gill—the father, for his son of the same name succeeded him as master of St. Paul’s—we have the orthoepy of our dialects given with great exactness. This work was produced about 1619, and we find the peculiar provincial pronunciation of the present day. A work so curious in the history of our vernacular tongue should not have been composed in Latin. Mr. Guest has carefully translated a judicious extract—“History of English Rhythms,” ii, 204.

4 The late Dr. Valpy told me that Mr. Walker, the orthoepist, had so intimate a knowledge of the provincial peculiarities of pronunciation, that in a private course of reading at Oxford with twelve undergraduates, he told each of them the respective place of their birth or early education.

5 Tooke’s “Diversions of Purley,” p. 141.

6 In “Anecdotes of the English Language,” by Samuel Pegge, an antiquary, who called himself “an old modern,” the reader will find several curious exemplifications of the vulgar dialect, sometimes fancifully, but often satisfactorily ascertained. It is amusing to detect what we call vulgarisms composing the language of Chaucer and Shakspeare, and even our Bibles and Liturgies.

7 Ray was the first who collected “Local Words, North Country and South and East Country.” “The Exmoor Scolding and Courtship” is an authentic specimen of the Exmoor Language. The words were collected by a blind fiddler, and the dialogues were written by a clergyman with the fiddler’s assistance, before 1725. We have a glossary of Lancashire words and phrases, contained in the humorous works of Tim Bobbin. Other county glossarists have appeared within the last fifteen years:—Brockett’s “North Country Words;” “Suffolk Words and Phrases,” by Major Moor; Mr. Roger Wilbraham’s “Attempt at a Glossary of Cheshire Words;” Mr. Jennings’ “Dialect of the West of England,” particularly the Somersetshire words; Mr. Britton on those of Wiltshire; and the Rev. Joseph Hunter has given “The Hallamshire Glossary,” to which are appended “Words used in Halifax,” by the Rev. John Watson, and also an addition to the “Yorkshire Words,” by Thoresby, the Leeds antiquary.

An investigation of the origin, nature, and history of Dialects was proposed by the late Dr. Boucher for a complete glossary of all the dialects of the kingdom. But these precious stores, not only of the vocables but of the domestic history of England—its manners, occupations, amusements, diet, dress, buildings, and other miscellaneous topics—rich in all the affluence of the laborious readings of more years than the siege of Troy, was but bread cast away on the waters, and was never given to the public for want of public support. After the author’s death, two eminent editors zealously resumed the work, which was already prepared; but the public remained so little instructed of its value, it suddenly ceased! Works of national utility should be consecrated as national property, and means should be always ready to avert such a calamity to the literature of England, and to the information of Englishmen, as was the suppression of the labours of Boucher.

MANDEVILLE; OUR FIRST TRAVELLER.

Mandeville was the Bruce of the fourteenth century, as often calumniated and even ridiculed. The most ingenuous of voyagers has been condemned as an idle fabulist; the most cautious, as credulous to fatuity; and the volume of a genuine writer, which has been translated into every European language, has been formally ejected from the collection of authentic travels. His truest vindication will be found by comprehending him; and to be acquainted with his character, we must seek for him in his own age.

At a period when Europe could hardly boast of three leisurely wayfarers stealing over the face of the universe; when the Orient still remained but a Land of Faery, and “the map of the world” was yet unfinished; at a time when it required a whole life to traverse a space which three years might now terminate, Sir John Mandeville set forth to enter unheard-of regions. Returning home, after an absence of more than thirty years, he discovered a “mervayle” strange as those which he loved to record—that he was utterly forgotten by his friends!

He had returned “maugre himself,” for four-and-thirty years had not satiated his curiosity; his noble career had submitted to ordinary infirmities—to gout and the aching of his limbs; these, he lamentably tells, had “defined the end of my labour against my will, God knoweth!” The knight in this pilgrimage of life seems to have contracted a duty with God, that while he had breath he should peregrinate, and, having nothing to do at home, be honourable in his generation by his enterprise over the whole earth. And earnestly he prays “to all the readers and hearers of my book,” (for “hearers” were then more numerous than “readers,”) “to say for him a Pater-Noster with an Ave-Maria.” He wrote for “solace in his wretched rest;” but the old passion, the devotion of his soul, finally triumphed over all arthritic pangs. The globe evidently was his true home; and thus Liege, and not London, received the bones of an unwearied traveller, whose thoughts were ever passing beyond the equator.

With us, to whom an excursion to “the Londe of Promyssioun or of Behest” has sometimes arisen out of a morning engagement—we who impelled by steam go “whither we list,” with those billets which might serve as letters of recommendation in the steppes of Tartary—we may wonder how our knight, who would not win his way by the arts of commerce, like his predecessor Marco Polo, bore up his chivalry; for in his traversing he had nothing to offer but his honourable sword, and probably his medical science, which might be sometimes as perilous. But difficulties insuperable to us could not enter into the emotions, nor were they the accidents which impeded the traveller, “who, on the day of St. Michael, in the year of our Lord 1322, passed the sea, and went the way to Hierusalem, and to behold the mervayles of Inde.” A deep religious emotion, an obscure indefinite curiosity, and a courageous decision to wander wherever the step of man could press on the globe, to tell the world “the mervayles” it unconsciously holds within its orb, were the inspiration of a journey which stood next in solemnity to a departure to the world of spirits. Sir John had prepared himself, for he was learned not only in languages, but in authentic romance, and in romantic history; and he honestly resolved to tell all “the mervayles” which he had seen, and those which he had not; and these last were not the least.

Sir John Mandeville’s probity remains unimpeached; for the accuracy of whatever he relates from his own personal observation has been confirmed by subsequent travellers. On his return to Europe he hastened to Rome to submit his book to the Pope, and to “his wise council,” and “those learned men of all nations who dwell at that court.” The volume was critically reviewed; and his holiness “ratified and confirmed my book in all points,” by referring to an account in Latin: this account was probably written by some missionary; Rubriquis had been dispatched on an unsuccessful mission to Christianize the great Khan of Tartary in 1230; or it was the writings of Marco Polo, which could not be unknown at Rome. In that day all real information was consigned to the fugitive manuscript, partially known, and often subject to the interpolations and capricious alterations of its possessor, and what sometimes occurred, to the silent plagiarisms of other writers—of which even Mandeville himself has been suspected.

The Pope decreed that not only all that Mandeville related was veracious, but that the Latin book which his holiness possessed contained much more, and from whence the Mappa Mundi had been made. Indeed Mandeville has himself told us that he wrote only from his recollections as they “would come into his mind;” these necessarily were often broken and obscure. Some “mervayles” remained unrecorded, and hereafter were to be “more plainly told;” but I fear these are lost for us.

In this “true” book we find many things very untrue, but we may doubt whether any in that day were as positive in this opinion. The author himself designed no imposition on his readers; he tells us what he believed; part of which he had seen and the rest he had heard, and sometimes had transcribed from sources deemed by him authentic. Who can suspect the knight of spotless honour, and whose piety would not relinquish his Ave-Marias for a dominion? Having fought during two years under the ensign of the Sultan of Egypt, and being offered in marriage the Sultan’s daughter and a province, he refused both, when his Christianity was to be exchanged for Mahometanism.

This was a period when the marvellous never weakened the authenticity of a tale. The mighty tome of Pliny, that awful repository of all the errors of antiquity, and other writers of equal name, detail prodigies and legends, and so do the Fathers. Who would not have rejoiced to transcribe Pliny or St. Austen? Who imagined that all the delectable adventures of the romances, over which they passed many a dreamy day, with the very names of the personages and the very places where they occurred, were solely chimeras of the brain? The learned Mandeville was evidently not one of these sceptics: for he observes, that “the trees of the sun and of the moon are well known to have spoken to King Alisaundre, and warned him of his death.” The unquestioned fact is in that famed romance; and others might be referred to if we required additional authority. I have read of these talking trees of the sun and moon in Guarino detto il Meschino, who lived a year among them to learn his own genealogy, and then was graceless enough to laugh at these timber-oracles. Mandeville forgot not in the island of Lango, not distant from Crete, the legend of the unfortunate “Lady of the Land,” who remained a dragoness, because no one had the hardihood to kiss her lips to disenchant her. He tells likewise of the Faery Lady who guarded the sparrow-hawk; whoever ventured to assist that lady during three days and nights, was rewarded by the boon of having whatever he wished. A king who, not wanting anything, had the audacity to wish to have the lady herself, was fairly warned that he did not know what he asked, as happens to the reckless; but, persisting in his absolute will, he incurred the curse of perpetual war to the last of his race!

We trace such tales among the romances, with all their circumstances; and some may have reached the listener from the Arabian tale-teller. The monsters he describes Mandeville never invented; these, human and animal, he gave as some of his predecessors had done, from Pliny, or Ælian, or Ctesias,1 who have sent them down to be engraven in the Great Nuremberg Chronicle, and adorned in the immortal page of Shakspeare. Marco Polo had noticed that portentous bird which could lift an elephant by its claws; he does not tell us that he had seen any bird of this wing, but we all know where it is to be found—in the Arabian Tales! Sir Thomas Browne accuses Mandeville of confirming the fabulous accounts of India by Ctesias; but, in truth, our knight does not “confirm these refuted notions of antiquity;” he only repeats them, with the prelude of “men seyn.” No one was more honest than Mandeville, for when he had to describe the locality of paradise, he fairly acknowledges that “he cannot speak of it properly, for I was not there; it is far beyond, but as I have heard say of wise men, it is on the highest part of the earth, nigh to the circle of the moon.” However, he has contrived to describe the wall, which is not of stone, but of moss, with but a single entrance, “closed with brennynge fyre;” and though no mortal could enter, yet it was known that there was a well in paradise, whence flowed the four floods that run through the earth. “Wise men,” he tells us, said this; some of these “wise men” were the Rabbins; and three centuries afterwards, the accounts of paradise, by a finer genius than Mandeville, the illustrious Rawleigh, remained much the same.

To explain some of those incredible incidents which occurred to the author himself might exercise some critical ingenuity. Mandeville’s adventure in “the Valley Perilous,” when he saw the Devil’s head with eyes of flame, great plenty of gold and silver, which he was too frightened to touch, and, moreover, a multitude of dead bodies, as if a battle had been fought there, might probably be resolved into some volcanic eruption, the rest supplied by his own horrifying imagination; for he tells, with great simplicity, “I was more devout then than ever I was before or after, and all for the dread of fiends that I saw in divers figures;” that is, at the shapes of the disparted rocks. The travellers were beaten down by tempests, winds, and thunder, which raged in this pent-up vale. As he marks the locality, the spot may yet be ascertained.

There was no imposition practised in all such legends; it is we who are startled by the supernatural in a personal narrative; but in the fourteenth century the more wonderful the tale, the more authentic it appeared, as it sunk into the softest and richest moulds of the most germinating imagination. The readers, or the hearers, were as well prepared to believe, as the writers prompt to gather up, their fictions. Collections of “Mirabilia Mundi,” “Wonders,” were a fashionable title applied to any single country, as well as to the world—to England or Ireland, to the Holy Land or the Indies. The “Mirabilia” might be the running title for a whole system of geography. The age of imagination has long been unfurnished of all its ingenious garniture, and yet we still catch at some evanescent hour of fancy susceptible of those ancient delights. We have lost something for which we have no substitute. Would not the modern novelist rejoice in the privilege of intermingling supernatural inventions to break the level of his every-day incidents and his trivial passions so soon forgotten? But that glowing day has set, leaving none of its ethereal hues in our cold twilight. Mandeville may still be read for those wild arabesques which so long unjustly proved fatal to his authentic narrative. His simplicity often warrants its truth; he assures us that Jerusalem is placed in the middle of the earth, because when he stuck his staff in the ground, exactly at noon, it cast no shadow; and having ascertained the spherical form of the globe, he marvels how the antipodes, whose feet are right upwards towards us, yet do not fall into the firmament! When he describes the elegant ornaments of “a vine made of gold that goeth all about the hall, with many bunches of grapes, some white, and the red made of rubies,” he tells what he had seen in some divan; but when he records that “the Emperor hath in his chamber a pillar of gold, in which is a ruby and carbuncle a foot long, which lighteth all his chamber by night,” it may be questioned whether this carbuncle be anything more than an Arabian fancy, a tale to which he had listened. Some of his ocular marvels have been confirmed by no questionable authority. Mandeville’s description of a magical exhibition before the Khan of Tartary is a remarkable instance of the strange optical illusions of the scenical art, and the adroitness of the Indian jugglers—a similar scene appears in a recent version of the autobiography of the Emperor Akber. What seemed the spells of magic to the Europeans of that age, and of which some marvellous descriptions were brought to Europe by the crusaders or the pilgrims, and embellished the romances, our exquisite masques and our grand pantomimes have realized. Three centuries were to elapse ere the court of England could rival the necromancy of the court of Tartary.

Mandeville first composed his travels in the Latin language, which he afterwards translated into French, and lastly out of French into English, that “every man of my nation may understand it.” We see the progressive estimation of the languages by this curious statement which Mandeville has himself given. The author first secured the existence of his work in a language familiar to the whole European world; the French was addressed to the politer circles of society; and the last language the author cared about was the vernacular idiom, which, at that time the least regarded, required all the patriotism of the writer in this devotion of his pen.

Copies of these travels were multiplied till they almost equalled in number those of the Scriptures; now we may smile at the “mervayles” of the fourteenth century, and of Mandeville, but it was the spirit of these intrepid and credulous minds which has marched us through the universe. To the children of imagination perhaps we owe the circumnavigation of the globe and the universal intercourse of nations.2

1 Ctesias, a physician in high repute at the Persian Court, and often referred to by Diodorus. He has been universally condemned as a fabulous writer, to which charge his descriptions of some animals was liable. But a naturalist of the highest order, the famous Cuvier, has perhaps done an act of justice to this fabricator of animals. Ctesias reported the mythological creations which he had witnessed in hieroglyphical representations as actual living animals. It is glorious to remove from the darkened name of a writer, unjustly condemned, the obloquy of two thousand years.—“Theory of the Earth,” translated by Professor Jameson, 76.

2 Of modern editions of Mandeville’s “Travels in England,” that of 1725, printed by Bowyer, is a large octavo. There are numerous manuscripts of Mandeville in existence. An edition collated might discover either omissions or interpolations. This might serve as the labour of an amateur. Mandeville has not had the fortune of his predecessor Marco Polo, to have met with a Marsden, learned in geographical and literary illustration.

Long subsequently to the time that this article was written, this edition of 1725 has been reprinted, with the advantage of a bibliographical introduction by Mr. Halliwell, and a collation of texts. [It was published in 1839, in an octavo volume of 326 pages, with illustrative engravings from manuscripts and printed books.]

CHAUCER.

In the chronology of our poetical collectors, Gower takes precedence of Chaucer unjustly, for Chaucer had composed many of his works in the only language which he has written before the elder claimed the honours of an English vernacular poet, and, probably, then only emulating the success of him who first set the glorious example. Nor less in the rank of poetry must Chaucer hold the precedence. The first true English poet is Chaucer; and notwithstanding that the rhythmical cadences of his unequal metre are now lost for us, Chaucer is the first modeller of the heroic couplet and other varieties of English versification. By the felicity of his poetic character, Chaucer was not only the parent, but the master, of those two schools of poetry which still divide its votaries by an idle rivalry, and which have been traced, like our architecture, the one to a Gothic origin, and the other to a classical model.

The personal history of Chaucer, poetical and political, might have been susceptible of considerable development had the poet himself written it, for his biographers had no life to record. Speght, one of the early editors, in the good method of that day, having set down a variety of heads, including all that we might wish to know of any man, when this methodiser of commonplaces came to fill up these well-planned divisions concerning Chaucer, he could only disprove what was accepted, and supply only what is uncertain. The “Life of Chaucer” by Godwin is a theoretical life, and, as much as relates to Chaucer himself, a single fatal fact, when all was finished, dispersed the baseless vision.1 The whole rested on the unauthenticated and contradictory statements of Leland, who, writing a century after the times of Chaucer, hastily collected unsubstantial traditions, and, what was less pardonable in Leland, fell into some anachronisms.

This defective chronology in the life of the poet has involved the more important subject of the chronology of his works. Posterity may be little concerned in the dates of his birth and his burial—his unknown parentage—his descriptive name—and, above all, his suspicious shield, which the heralds opined must have been blazoned out of the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth propositions of the first book of Euclid, from the poet’s love of geometry, or, more obviously, from having no coat-of-arms to show of “far more ancient antiquity.” But posterity would have been interested in the history of the genius of Chaucer, who having long paced in a lengthened circuit of verbal version and servile imitation, passed through some remarkable transitions, kindling the cold ashes of translation into the fire of invention; from cloudy allegory breaking forth into the sunshine of the loveliest landscape-painting; and from the amatory romance gliding into that vein of humour and satire which in his old age poured forth a new creation. All this he might himself have told, or Gower might have revealed, had the elder bard who lauded the lays and “ditties” of the youth of “the Clerk of Venus” loved him as well in his old age. But elegant literature, as distinguished from scholastic, was then without price or reward. The few men of genius who have written at this early period are only known to us by their writings, and probably were more known to their contemporaries by the station which they may have occupied, than by that which they maintain with posterity.

By royal patents and grants to the poet, we trace his early life at court, his various appointments, and his honourable missions to Genoa and to France—we must not add as confidently his visit to Petrarch.

Chaucer, in his political life, was bound up with the party of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster; and, by a congenial spirit, with the novel doctrines of his friend, Dr. Wickliffe. The sister of his lady finally became the third Duchess of Lancaster, and the family alliance strengthened the political bond. How the Lancastrian exploded in the poet, something we know, but little we comprehend; and those who have attempted to lift the veil have not congratulated themselves on their success. The poet himself has not entrusted his secret to posterity, except, as is usual with poets, by eloquent lamentations. The exposition of a political transaction is never without some valued results; and though deprived of names and dates, we are not without some dim lights: the palpable truth may not be obvious, but it may happen that we may stumble on it.

Chaucer himself has stated, “In my youth I was drawn in to be assenting to certain conjurations and other great matters of ruling of citizens, and those things have been my drawers in and exciters in the matters so painted and coloured, that first to me seemed then noble and glorious for all the people.”

Here the tale is plain, for this is the language of one who early in life had engaged in some popular scheme, and these early indications of the temper of the Wickliffite or the Lancastrian, or both, had subsequently led to some more perilous attempts. They were, like all reforms, something “noble and glorious for the people,” and as sometimes happens among reformers, what at first appeared to promise so well, ended in disappointment and “penance in a dark prison.”

The locality of this patriotic act was the city of London. He alludes to “free elections by great clamours of much people,” for great disease of misgovernment in the hands of “torcentious citizens.” When the fatal day arrived that he openly joined with a party for “the people,” against those citizens whom he has so awfully denounced, it is evident, though we have no means to discriminate factions in an age of factions,2 that he and his “conjurors” discovered that “all the people” were not of one mind. This votary or this victim of reform suddenly flings his contempt at “the hatred of the mighty senators of London or of its commonalty,” and closes with a painful remembrance of “the janglings of THE SHEEPY PEOPLE!” The style of Chaucer bears the stamp of passionate emotions; words of dimension, or of poignant sarcasm. The “torcentious citizens” is an awful bolt, and “the sheepy people” is sufficiently picturesque.

In dismay the whole party took flight. Chaucer, in Zealand, exhausted his means to supply the wants of his political associates, till he himself found that even the partnership of common misery does not always preserve men from ingratitude. Returning home, potent persecutors cast him into a dungeon. Was the Duke of Lancaster absent, or the Duke of Gloucester in power? Let us observe that in all these dark events the loyalty of the poet is never impeached, for Chaucer enjoyed without interruption the favour of both his sovereigns, Edward III. and Richard II.; and we discover that once when dismissed from office, Richard allowed him to serve by deputy, which was evidence that Chaucer had never been dismissed by the king himself. The whole transaction, whatever it was, was a political movement between two factions. Chaucer indeed pleads that whatever he had done was under the control of others, himself being but “the servant of his sovereign.” At that period the factions in the state were more potent than the monarch. In the convulsive administration of a youthful prince, they who oppose the court are not necessarily opposing the sovereign.

It was behind the bars of a gloomy window in the Tower, where “every hour appeared to be a hundred winters,” that Chaucer, recent from exile, and sore from persecution, was reminded of a work popular in those days, and which had been composed in a dungeon—“The Consolations of Philosophy,” by Boethius—and which he himself had formerly translated. He composed his “Testament of Love,” substituting for the severity of an abstract being the more genial inspiration of love itself. But the fiction was a reality, and the griefs were deeper than the fancies. In this chronicle of the heart the poet mourns over “the delicious hours he was wont to enjoy,” of his “richesse,” and now of his destitution—the vain regret of his abused confidence—the treachery of all that “summer-brood” who never approach the lost friend in “the winter hour” of an iron solitude. The poet energetically describes his condition; there he sate “witless, thoughtful; and sightless, looking.” This work the poet has composed in prose; but in the leisure of a prison the diction became more poetical in thoughts and in words than the language at that time had yet attained to, and for those who read the black letter it still retains its impressive eloquence.

But this apology which Chaucer has left of his conduct in this political transaction has incurred a fatal censure. “Never,” observes Mr. Campbell, “was an obscure affair conveyed in a more obscure apology.” His political integrity has been freely suspected. Chaucer has even been struck by the brilliant arrow of the Viscount de Chateaubriand. “Courtisan, Lancastrien, Wickliffist, infidèle à ses convictions, traitre à son parti, tantôt banni, tantôt voyageur, tantôt en faveur, tantôt en disgrace.” No, thou eloquent Gaul! Chaucer never was out of favour, however he may have been more than once dismissed from his office; nor can we know whether the poet was ever “infidèle à ses convictions.”

Obscure must ever remain the tale of justification in a political transaction which terminated on the part of the apologist by revealing “disclosures for the peace of the kingdom,” denied by those whom they implicated, though their truth was offered to be maintained by the accuser, in the custom of the times, by single combat; and by confessions which acknowledge errors of judgment, but not of intention; and by penitence, which, if the patriot designed what was “glorious to all the people,” he should never have repented of.

This obscure apology conceals the agony of conflicting emotions—indignation at ungrateful associates, and a base desertion of ancient friends, who were plotting against him. Whether Chaucer was desirous of burying in obscurity a story of torturous details, or one too involved in confused motives for any man to tell with the precision of a simple statement, we know of no evidence which can enable us to decide with any certainty on an affair which no one pretends to understand. Chaucer might have been the scapegoat of the sovereign, or the champion of the people. We can rather decide on his calamity than his conduct. Many are the causes which may dissolve the bonds of faithless “conjurations;” and it is not always he who abandons a party who is to be criminated by political tergiversation.

The circumstances of Chaucer’s life had combined with his versatile powers. He had mingled with the world’s affairs both at home and abroad: accomplished in manners, and intimately connected with a splendid court, Chaucer was at once the philosopher who had surveyed mankind in their widest sphere, the poet who haunted the solitudes of nature, and the elegant courtier whose opulent tastes are often discovered in the graceful pomp of his descriptions. It was no inferior combination of observation and sympathy which could bring together into one company the many-coloured conditions and professions of society, delineated with pictorial force, and dramatised by poetic conception, reflecting themselves in the tale which seemed most congruous to their humours. The perfect identity of these assembled characters, after the lapse of near five centuries, make us familiar with the domestic habits and modes of thinking of a most interesting period in our country, not inspected by the narrow details of the antiquarian microscope, but in the broad mirror reflecting that truth or satire which alone could have discriminated the passions, the pursuits, and the foibles of society. Thus the painter of nature, who caught the glow of her skies and her earth in his landscape, was also the miniature portrayer of human likenesses. When Chaucer wrote, the classics of antiquity were imperfectly known in this country—the Grecian muse had never reached our shores; this was, probably, favourable to the native freedom of Chaucer. The English poet might have lost his raciness by a cold imitation of the Latin masters; among the Italians, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, Chaucer found only models to emulate or to surpass. Hence the English bard indulged that more congenial abundance of thoughts and images which owns no other rule than the pleasure it yields in the profusion of nature and fancy. A great poet may not be the less Homeric because he has never read Homer.

Nature in her distinct forms lies open before this poet-painter; his creative eye pursued her through all her mutability, but in his details he was a close copier. In his rural scenery there is a freshness in its luxuriance; for his impressions were stamped by their locality. This locality is so remarkable, that Pope had a notion, which he said no one else had observed, that Chaucer always described real places to compliment the owners of particular gardens and fine buildings. Let us join him in his walks—

When that the misty vapour was agone, And clear and fair was the morníng, The dews, like silver, shiníng Upon the leaves.

The flowers sparkle in “their divers hues”—he sometimes counts their colours—“white, blue, yellow, and red”—on their stalks, spreading their leaves in breadth against the sun, gold-burned. His grass is “so small, so thick, so fresh of hue.” The poet goes by a river whose water is “clear as beryl or crystal;” turning into “a little way” towards a park in compass round, and by a small gate.

Whoso that would freely might gone (go) Into this Park walled with green stone.

The owner of that park, probably, was startled when he came to “the little way,” and to “the small gate.” This was either the park of some great personage, or possibly Woodstock Park, where stood a stone lodge, so long known by the name of “Chaucer’s House,” that in the days of Elizabeth it was still described as such in the royal grant. If poets have rarely built houses, at least their names have consecrated many.

His

Garden upon a river in a green mead; The gravel gold, the water pure as glass,

and “the eglantine and sycamore arbour, so thickly woven, where the priers who stood without all day could not discover whether any one was within,” was assuredly some particular garden. The stately grove has all the characters of its trees—the oak, the ash, and the fir—to “the fresh hawthorn,”

Which in white motley that so swote doth smell.

In all these lovely scenes there was a delicious sense of joyous existence; the inmates of the forest burst forth, from “the little conies, the beasts of gentle kind,” to “the dreadful roe and the buck,” and from their green leaves they who “with voice of angels” entranced the poet-musician—

So loud they sang that all the woodés rung Like as it should shiver in pieces small, And as methought that the Nightingale With so great might her voice out-wrest, Right as her heart for love would brest (burst).

So true is the accidental remark of the celebrated Charles Fox, that “of all poets Chaucer seems to have been the fondest of the singing of birds.” These were the peculiar delights in the poetic habits of Chaucer, who was an early riser, and often mused on many a rondel in gardens, and meads, and woods, at earliest dawn. This poet’s sun-risings are the most exhilarating in our poetry.

We may doubt if the vernal scenes of Chaucer can be partaken by his more chilly posterity. Did England in the seasons of Chaucer flourish with a more genial May and a more refulgent June? Or should we suspect that the travelled poet clothed our soil with the luxuriance of Provençal fancy, and borrowed the clear azure of Italy to soften the British roughness even of our skies?

Tyrwhit, the able commentator of Chaucer, has thrown out an incidental remark, which seems equally refined and true. “Chaucer in his serious pieces often follows his author with the servility of a mere translator; and in consequence his narration is jejune and constrained (as often appears in the “Romaunt of the Rose” and his translations of Dante), whereas in the comic he is generally satisfied with borrowing a slight hint of his subject, which he varies, enlarges, and embellishes at pleasure, and gives the whole the air and colour of an original; a sure sign that his genius rather led him to compositions of the latter kind.”

This remark is an instance of critical sagacity. The creative faculty in Chaucer had not broken forth in his translations, which evidently were his earliest writings. The native bent of his genius, the hilarity of his temper, betrays itself by playful strokes of raillery and concealed satire when least expected. His fine irony may have sometimes left his commendations, or even the objects of his admiration, in a very ambiguous condition. The learned editor of the second part of the “Paston Letters” hence has been induced to infer that the spirit of chivalry, from the reign of the third Edward, had entirely declined, and only existed in the forms of conventional and fashionable society, and had sunk into a mere foppery, a system of forms and etiquettes, because Chaucer, a court-poet, treats with irony the chivalric manners. Whether this ingenious inference will hold with literary antiquaries, I will not decide; but I am inclined to suspect that Chaucer’s indulgence of his taste for irony was not in the mind of this learned editor. Our poet has stamped with his immortal ridicule the tale told in his own person—“The Rime of Sir Thopas,” which is considered as a burlesque of the metrical romances. In those days there was an inundation of these romances, as “the thirst and hunger” of the present is accommodated with as spurious a brood. We have our “drafty prose” as they had their “drafty riming.” But shall we infer from this ludicrous effusion of the great poet, that he held so light the venerable fablers, the ancient romancers, with whose “better parts” he had nourished his own genius? This is his own confession. Often in his years of grief, when the poet wondered

How he lived, for day ne night, I may not sleep— Sitting upright in my bed,

then it was that he prescribed for his “secret sorrows” that medicine which, “drunk deeply,” makes us forget ourselves. In those hours the poet

Bade one reach me a Boke, A Romance, and he it me took To read, and drive the Night away; For methought it better play Than play either at Chess or Tables.

And assuredly Chaucer found many passages in the old fablers not less entrancing than some of his own. Our poet indulged this vein of playful irony on persons as well as on things. A sly panegyric, sufficiently ambiguous for us to accept as a refined stroke, we find on the abstruse and interminable question of predestination; on which the Nonne’s priest declares—

But I ne cannot boult it to the bren, As can the holy doctor Augustín, Or Bœcé, or the bishop Bradwardín.

As this bishop, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, was the first who treated theology on mathematical principles, and likewise wrote on the “Quadrature of the Circle,” we may presume “Bishop Bradwardin” rather perplexed the poet. Chaucer discovers his ironical manner when gravely stating the different theories of dreaming—

————What causeth Suevenes3 On the morrow or on evens?

he playfully concludes, and modern philosophy could no better assist the inquiry—

————Whoso of these Miracles The causes know bet4 than I Define he, for I certainly Ne can them not, ne never thinke To busie my witte for to swinke To know why this is more than that is, Well worthé of this thing Clerkés, That treaten of this and of other werkés, For I, of none opinion Nil.

It is with the same pleasantry he avoids all commonplace descriptions, by playfully suggesting his pretended unskilfulness for the detail, or his want of learning—

Me list not of the chaf, ne of the stre, Maken so long a tale, as of the corn. “Man of Lawe’s Ta’e.”

Yet humour and irony are not his only excellences, for those who study Chaucer know that this great poet has thoughts that dissolve in tenderness; no one has more skilfully touched the more hidden springs of the heart.

The Herculean labour of Chaucer was the creation of a new style. In this he was as fortunate as he was likewise unhappy. He mingled with the native rudeness of our English words of Provençal fancy, and some of French and of Latin growth. He banished the superannuated and the uncouth, and softened the churlish nature of our hard Anglo-Saxon; but the poet had nearly endangered the novel diction when his artificial pedantry assumed what he called “the ornate style” in “the Romaunt of the Rose,” and in his “Troilus and Cressida.” This “ornate style” introduced sesquipedalian Latinisms, words of immense dimensions, that could not hide their vacuity of thought. Chaucer seems deserted by his genius when “the ornate style” betrays his pangs and his anxiety. As the error of a fine genius becomes the error of many, because monstrous protuberances may be copied, while the softened lines of beauty remain inimitable, this “ornate style” corrupted inferior writers, who, losing all relish of the natural feeling and graceful simplicity of their master, filled their verse with noise and nonsense. This vicious style, a century afterwards, was resumed by Stephen Hawes. We have, however, a glorious evidence, amid this struggle both with a new and with a false style, of Chaucer’s native good taste; he finally wholly abandoned this artificial diction; and his later productions, no longer disfigured by such tortured phrases and such remote words, awaken our sympathy in the familiar language of life and passion.

Tyrwhit has ingeniously constructed a metrical system to arrange the versification to the ear of a modern reader; by this contrivance he would have removed all obstructions in the pronunciation and in the syllabic quantities. He maintained that the lines were regular decasyllabics. But who can read this poet for any length, even the “Canterbury Tales” in the elaborated text of Tyrwhit, without being reminded of its fallacy? Even the E final, on which our critic has laid such stress, though often sounded, assuredly is sometimes mute. Dan Chaucer makes at his pleasure words long or short, and dyssyllabic or trisyllabic; and this he has himself told us—

But for the rime is light and lewde, Yet make it somewhat agreáble, Though some verse fail in a sylláble.

Our critic was often puzzled by his own ingenuity, for in some inveterate cases he has thrown out in despair an observation, that “a reader who cannot perform such operations for himself (that is, helping out the metre) had better not trouble his head about the versification of our ancient authors.” The verse of Chaucer seems more carefully regulated in his later work, “the Tales;” but it is evident that Chaucer trusted his cadences to his ear, and his verse is therefore usually rhythmical, and accidentally metrical.

On a particular occasion the poet submitted to the restraint of equal syllables, as we discover in “The Court of Love,” elaborately metrical, and addressed to “his princely lady,” with the hope that she might not refuse it “for lack of ornate speech.” It is evident, therefore, that Chaucer had a distinct conception of the heroic or decasyllabic verse, but he did not consider that the mechanical construction of his verse was essential to the free spirit of his fancy. “I am no metrician,” he once exclaimed; he wrote

Books, songs, ditees In RIME, or else in CADENCE. “The House of Fame.”

This circumstance arose from the custom of the age, when poems were recited, and not read; readers there were none among the people, though auditors were never wanting; it was much the same among the higher orders. Poems were usually performed in plain chant, and a verse was musical by the modulation of the harp. There was no typographical metre placed under the eye of the reciter; the melody of the poet too often depended on the adroitness of the performer; and the only publishers of the popular poems of Chaucer were the harpers, who, in stately halls on festal days, entranced their audience with Chaucer’s Tale, or his “Ballade.” His poem of “Troilus and Cressida,” although almost as long as the Æneid, was intended to be sung to the harp as well as read, as the poet himself tells us, in addressing his poem—

And redde where so thou be, or elles sung.

In the most ancient manuscripts of Chaucer’s works the cæsura in every line is carefully noted, to preserve the rhythmical cadence with precision; without this precaution the harmony of such loose versification would be lost. In the later editions, when the race of roaming minstrels had departed, and our verse had become solely metrical, the printers omitted this guide to the ancient recitation. We perceive this want in the uncertain measures of Chaucer’s versification; and a dexterous modulation is still required to catch the recitative of Chaucer’s poems.