260 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



what an editor of old doggerel would benignantly call humour, 

 in the tanner s forgetfulness of his raiment, but the cart is as 

 little to the purpose as one of Mr. Hazlitt s own notes. The 

 tanner was on horseback, as the roads of the period required 

 that he should be, and good old Ritson was plainly on the right 

 track in his reading, though his text was muddled by a misprint. 

 As it was, he got one word right, and so far has the advantage 

 of Mr. Hazlitt. The true reading is, of course, ner a dell, never 

 a deal, not a whit. The very phrase occurs in another poem 

 which Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in his collection, 



For never a. dell 



He wyll me love agayne. (Vol. III. p. 2.) 



That adell was a misprint in Ritson is proved by the fact that 

 the word does not appear in his glossary. If we were to bring 

 Mr. Hazlitt to book for his misprints ! In the poem we have 

 just quoted he gravely prints, 



Matter in dede, 

 My sides did blede, 



for mother, indede, through ryght wysencs* for though 

 ryghtwisenes, with man vnkynde for sith man vnkynde, ye 

 knowe a parte for ye knowe aperte, here in for herein/ all 

 of which make nonsense, and all come within the first one 

 hundred and fifty lines, and those of the shortest, mostly of four 

 syllables each. Perhaps they rather prove ignorance than want 

 of care. One blunder falling within the same limits we have 

 reserved for special comment, because it affords a good example 

 of Mr. Hazlitt s style of editing : 



Your herte souerayne 



Clouen in twayne 



By longes the blynde. (Vol. III. p. 7.) 



Here the uninstructed reader would be as completely in the 

 dark as to what longes meant as the editor plainly was himselfi 

 The old rhymer no doubt wrote Longis, meaning thereby 

 Longinus, a personage familiar enough, one should think, to any 

 reader of mediaeval poetry. Mr. Hazlitt absolves himself for 

 not having supplied a glossary by the plea that none is needed 

 by the class of readers for whom his volumes are intended. But 

 this will hardly seem a valid excuse for a gentleman who often 

 goes out of his way to explain in his notes such simple matters 

 as that ( shape means form, and that Johan of the golden 

 mouthe means St. Chrysostom, which, indeed, it does not, 

 any more than Johannes Baptista means St. Baptist. We will 

 supply Mr. Hazlitt with an illustration of the passage from 



