CHA UCER. 245 



where we must either strike out the second &quot; I,&quot; or put it 

 after &quot; speake.&quot; 



One often finds such changes made by ear justified by 

 the readings in other texts, and we cannot but hope that 

 the Chaucer Society will give us the means of at last 

 settling upon a version which shall make the poems of one 

 of the most fluent of metrists at least readable. Let any 

 one compare the &quot; Franklin s Tale &quot; in the Aldine edition* 

 with the text given by Wright, and he will find both sense 

 and metre clear themselves up in a surprising way. A 

 careful collation of texts, by the way, confirms one s 

 confidence in Tyrwhitt s good taste and thoroughness. 



A writer in the &quot;Proceedings of the Philological So 

 ciety&quot; has lately undertaken to prove that Chaucer did not 

 sound the final or medial e, and throws us back on the old 

 theory that he wrote &quot;riding-rime,&quot; that is, verse to the 

 eye and not the ear. This he attempts to do by showing 

 that the Anglo-Norman poets themselves did not sound 

 the e, or, at any rate, were not uniform in so doing. It 

 should seem a sufficient answer to this merely to ask whence 

 modern French poetry derived its rules of pronunciation so 

 like those of Chaucer, so different from those of prose. But 

 it is not enough to prove that some of the Anglo-Norman 

 rhymers were bad versifiers. Let us look for examples in 

 the works of the best poet among them all, Marie de 

 France, with whose works Chaucer was certainly familiar. 

 What was her practice ? I open at random and find 

 enough to overthrow the whole theory : 



&quot; Od sa fillet ke le cela 

 Tut li curages li fremi 

 Di mei, fet-ele par ta fei 

 La Dameisele 1 aporta 

 Ear ne li sembla mie boeris 

 La dame 1 aveit apelee 

 Et la mere 1 areisuna.&quot; 



* One of the very worst, be it said in passing. 



t Whence came, pray, the Elizabethan commandement clmpelain, 

 surety, and a score of others ? Whence the Scottish bonny, and so 

 many English words of Romance derivation ending in y 1 



