OBSERVATIONS ON THE LANGUAGE OF CHAUCER. 441 
uniformity in the language and of the negligence of copyists, Chaucer thought the 
prospect of his verses being preserved as he wrote them very unpromising, and he 
expresses his apprehension thus in an important passage towards the end of Troi- 
lus and Cressida: à 
* And for there is so gret diversité 
In Englissh and in writynge of our tonge, ` 
So preye I God that non myswrite the, 
Ne the mysmetere for defaute of tonge.” ^. ` 
This anxiety of Chaucer about the writing and reading of his verses was a thou- 
sand times justified by the course of events. If he could not get his poems correctly 
transcribed and pronounced in his own day, there was no sort of chance that his 
language and metre would pass unscathed through the revolution English was 
to undergo in the next century, even on the supposition that some care was taken 
to perpetuate the original But no such care was taken: On the contrary, if we 
are to believe Mr. Wright, *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." When 
manuscripts ceased to be produced, there was naturally a conclusion to the multi- 
plication of diversity in this way. Such errors and alterations of copyists as had 
been made were then fixed by printing, and to these were added the usual blun- 
ders of the press and the deliberate corruptions of editors. 
As the old printed editions of Chaucer have been entirely superseded, we need 
not spend time upon them. The Canterbury Tales were first printed about 1475, 
by Caxton, from a bad manuscript, and six years after from a better. Some ten 
reprints, with the addition of other poems, followed, the last in 1721, by Urry, whose 
only rule for editing Chaucer was his own ignorant fancy, and who produced, as 
Tyrwhitt gently says, by far the worst text that was ever published. The first 
serious attempt to restore the genuine text of the Canterbury Tales was made by 
Tyrwhitt in 1775, three hundred years after they were first printed by Caxton. 
Tyrwhitt’s edition of the Canterbury Tales has enjoyed the highest reputation, and 
the estimation in which it has been held is in great part deserved, and ought to 
be permanent. He “collated or consulted" about twenty-five manuscripts, illus- 
trated the Tales with many admirable notes, to which very little has since been 
added, and drew up a very good Glossary of the whole works of Chaucer. The 
weak point of Tyrwhitt's edition of the Canterbury Tales is the text, which was 
formed on a wrong principle and without sufficient philological knowledge. Tyr- 
whitt, to be sure, made some attempt to ascertain the laws of Chaucer's language, 
