172 CHAUCER. 



festly unfinished condition of the Canterbury Tales. That a 

 man of seventy odd could have put such a spirit of youth into 

 those matchless prologues will not, however, surprise those who 

 remember Dryden s second spring-time. It is plain that the 

 notion of giving unity to a number of disconnected stories by 

 the device which Chaucer adopted was an afterthought. These 

 stories had been written, and some of them even published, 

 at periods far asunder, and without any reference to connection 

 among themselves. The prologues, and those parts which 

 internal evidence justifies us in taking them to have been 

 written after the thread of plan to string them on was conceived, 

 are in every way more mature in knowledge of the world, in 

 easy mastery of verse and language, and in the overpoise of 

 sentiment by judgment. They may with as much probability 

 be referred to a green old age as to the middle-life of a man 

 who, upon any theory of the dates, was certainly slow in 

 ripening. 



The formation of a Chaucer Society, now four centuries and 

 a half after the poet s death, gives suitable occasion for taking a 

 new observation of him, as of a fixed star, not only in our own, 

 but in the European literary heavens, f whose worth s unknown 

 although his height be taken. The admirable work now doing 

 by this Society, whose establishment was mainly due to the 

 pious zeal of Mr. Furnivall, deserves recognition from all who 

 know how to value the too rare union of accurate scholarship 

 with minute exactness in reproducing the text. The six-text 

 edition of the Canterbury Tales, giving what is practically 

 equivalent to six manuscript copies, is particularly deserving of 

 gratitude from this side the water, as it for the first time affords 

 to Americans the opportunity of independent critical study and 

 comparison. This beautiful work is fittingly inscribed to our 

 countryman, Professor Child, of Harvard, a lover of Chaucer, 

 so proved by his wordes and his werke, who has done more 

 for the great poet s memory than any man since Tyrwhitt. We 

 earnestly hope that the Society may find enough support to 

 print all the remaining manuscript texts of importance, for there 

 can hardly be any one of them that may not help us to a 

 valuable hint. The works of M. Sandras and Herr Hertzberg 

 show that this is*a ^natter of interest not merely or even prima 

 rily to English scholars. The introduction to the latter is one 

 of the best essays on Chaucer yet written, while the former, 

 which is an investigation of the French and Italian sources of 



