264 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



And thorow that worde y felle in pryde ; 

 As the aungelle can of hevyn glyde, 

 And with the tywnkling* of an eye 

 God for-dud alle that maystrye 

 And so hath he done for my gylte. 



Now the angel here is Lucifer, and can of hevyn glyde means 

 simply r fell from heaven, not was falling. It is in the same tense 

 as for-dud in the next line. The fall of the angels is surely &fait 

 accompli. In the last line, by the way, Mr. Hazlitt changes 

 my for to * for my/ and wrongly, the my agreeing with maystrye 

 understood. In modern English we should use mine in the same 

 way. But Sir Frederick Madden can take care of himself. 



We have less patience with Mr. Hazlitt s impertinence to 

 Ritson, a man of ample reading and excellent taste in selec 

 tion, and who, real scholar as he was, always drew from 

 original sources. We have a foible for Ritson with his oddities 

 of spelling, his acerb humour, his unconsciously depreciatory 

 mister Tyrwhitts and mister Bryants, and his obstinate disbelief 

 in Doctor Percy s folio manuscript. Above all, he was a most 

 conscientious editor, and an accurate one so far as was possible 

 with the lights of that day. Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted two 

 poems, * The Squyr of Low Degre and The Knight of Curtesy, 

 which had already been edited by Ritson. The former of these 

 has passages that are unsurpassed in simple beauty by anything 

 in our earlier poetry. The author of it was a good versifier, and 

 Ritson, though he corrected some glaring errors, did not deal 

 so trenchantly with verses manifestly lamed by the copyist as 

 perhaps an editor should.f Mr. Hazlitt says of Ritson s text, 

 that it offers more than an hundred departures from the ori 

 ginal/ and of the * Knight of Curtesy/ that Ritson s text is by 

 no means accurate. Now Mr. Hazlitt has adopted nearly all 

 of Ritson s emendations, without giving the least hint of it. 

 On the contrary, in some five or six instances, he gives the 

 original reading in a foot-note with an old ed. has so and so, 

 thus leaving the reader to infer that the corrections were his 

 own. Where he has not followed Ritson, he has almost uni 

 formly blundered, and that through sheer ignorance. For 

 example, he prints, 



Alas ! it tourned to wroth her heyle, 



* The careless Ritson would have printed this t^vynkling. 

 For example : 



And in the arber was a tre 

 A fairer in the world might none be, 

 should certainly read, 



None fairer in the world might be. 



