May 31. 1851.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



41» 



mony on ihe part of Mii. Dawson Turner to the value 

 of the plan under consideration, and there are few anti- 

 quaries whose opinions are entitled to greater respect 

 upon this or any other jjoint to which he has devoted his 

 talents and attention. Can we doubt, then, the success 

 of a plan which has met with such general approbation, 

 and is undertaken with so praiseworthy an object, — an 

 object which may well be desciibed in the words which 

 Weever used when stating the motive which led him 

 to undertake the publication of his Funeral Monuments, 

 viz., " To check the unsufTerable injury, offered as well 

 to the living as to the dead, by breaking down and 

 almost utterly ruinating monuments with their epitaphs, 

 and by erasing, tearing away, and pilfering brazen in- 

 scriptions, by which inhumane deformidable act, the 

 honorable memory of many virtuous and noble persons 

 deceased is extinguished, and the true understanding 

 of divers families is so darkened, that the course of 

 their inheritanee is thereby partly interrupted." 



ILLL'STRATIONS OF CHAUCEK, NO. VIII. 



The Star Min Al Auwd. 



" Adam Scrivener, if ever it thee befall 

 Boece, or Troilus, for to write newe, 

 Under thy long locks thou mayst have the scull 

 But, after my making, thou write more trew ; 

 So olt a day I mote tliy worke renew, 

 It to correct, and eke to rubbe and scrape. 

 And all thorow thy negligence and rape." 



Chaucer to his own Scrivener, 



If, during his own lifetime, and under liis own eye, 

 poor Cliaucer was so sinned against as to provoke 

 this humorous malediction upon the head of the 

 delinquent, it cannot be a matter of surprise that, 

 ill tlie various liands his te.\t has since passed 

 through, many expressions should have been per- 

 verted, and certain passages wholly misundeistood. 

 And when we find men, of excellent judgment in 

 other respects, proposing, asTyrwhitt did, to alter 

 Chaucer's words to suit their own imperfect coin- 

 preiicnsion of his meaning, it is only reasonable to 

 suspect that similar mi.stakes may have induced 

 early transcribers to alter the text, wherever, to 

 their wisdom, it may have seemed ex|)edient. 



Now I know of no passage more likely to have 

 been tampere<l with in this way, ihan those lines 

 of the prologue to the Peisones Talc, alluded to 

 :it the close of my last communication. Because, 

 Hipposing (whicii 1 shall afterwards endeavour to 

 ])rove) that Chaucer really meant to write some- 

 thing to this ell'ect : " Tiiercupon, as we were en- 

 tering a town, the moon's rising, with Mm al auwi\ 

 in Libr;i, began to ascend (or to become visible)," 

 — and supposing that his mode of exiiressing this 

 had been. 



" Therewith the moiie's exaltacioun. 

 In libra men alawai gau ascende, 

 As we were ei^trying at a towne's end:" 



— in such a case, what can be more probable than 

 that some ignorant transcriber, never perhaps 

 dreaming of such a thing as the Arabic name of 

 a star, would emleavour to make sense of these, 

 to him, obscure words, by converting tliem into 

 English. The process of transition would be easy ; 

 "min" or "men" requires little violence to be- 

 come " mene " (the modern " mean " with its 

 many significations), and "al auwa" (or "alwai," as 

 Chaucer would probably write it) is equally iden- 

 tical with " alway." The misplacement of "Libra " 

 might then follow as a seeming necessity ; and 

 thus the line would assume its present form, 

 leaving the reader to understand it, either with 

 Urry, as, 



'■ I mene Libra, that is, I refer to Libra ;" 



or with Tyrwhitt : 



" In mene Libra, that is, In the middle of Libra." 



Now, to Urry's reading, it may be objected that 

 it makes the thing ascending to be Libra, and does 

 not of necessity imjily tlie moon's appearance 

 above the horizon. But since the rising of the 

 moon is a visible phenomenon, while that of Libra 

 is theoretical, it must have been to the former 

 Chaucer was alluding, as to something witnessed 

 by the whole party as they 



" Were entrying at a towne's end ;" 



or otherwise this latter observation would have no 

 meaning. 



The objection toTyrwhitt's reading is of a more 

 technical nature — the moon, if in ihe middle of 

 Libra, could not be above the horizon, in the 

 neighbourhood of Canterbury, at four o'clock P. m., 

 in the month of April. Tyrwhitt, it is true, 

 would probably smooth away the difficulty by 

 charging it as another inconsistency against hia 

 author; but I — and I hope by this time such 

 readers of "Notes and Qdeeies" as are interested 

 in the subject — have seen too many proofs of 

 Chaucer's competency in matters of science, and 

 of his coinmentat(n''s incompetency, to feel dis- 

 posed to concede to the latter such a convenient 

 method of interpretation. 



But there is a third objection common to both 

 readings — that they do not satisfactorily account 

 for the word "alway;" for although Tyrwhitt 

 endeavours to explain it by continiiulli/, " was 

 continually ascending," such a phrase is by no 

 means intelligible when applied to a single ob- 

 servation. 



For myself, I can say that tliis word "alway" 

 was, from the first, the great dilHculty with me — 

 and the more I became convinced of the studied 

 meaning with wliich Chaucer chose his L^tlier ex- 

 pressions, the lesB satisfied I was with this ; and 



