248 CHAUCER. 



De vous remonstrer, dame chier, 

 Par quel art ne par quel maniere, 

 J ai eu ce comencement 

 De 1 amourous atouchement.&quot; 



If we try Philippe Mouskes, a mechanical rhymer, if ever 

 there was one, and therefore the surer not to let go the 

 leading-strings of rule, the result is the same. 



But Chaucer, it is argued, was not uniform in his practice. 

 Would this be likely ? Certainly with those terminations 

 (like courtesie) which are questioned, and in diphthongs 

 generally. Dante took precisely the same liberties. 



Facea le stelle a noi parer prh radi, 

 Ne fu per fantasia giamnuw compreso, 

 Poi piovve dentro all alta fantasia, 

 Solea valor e cortesia trovarsi, 

 Che ne nvogliava amor e cortesia.&quot; 



Here we have fantasi and fantasia, cortesl and cortesid. 

 Even Pope has promiscuous, obsequious, as trisyllables, 

 individual as a quadrisyllable, and words like tapestry, 

 opera, indifferently as trochees or dactyls according to their 

 place in the verse. Donne even goes so far as to make 

 Cain a monosyllable and dissyllable in the same verse : 



&quot; Sister and wife to Cain, Cain that first did plough.&quot; 



The csesural pause (a purely imaginary thing in accentual 

 metres) may be made to balance a line like this of Donne s, 



11 Are they not like | singers at doors for meat,&quot; 



but we defy anyone by any trick of voice to make it supply 

 a missing syllable in what is called our heroic measure, so 

 mainly used by Chaucer. 



Enough and far more than enough on a question about 

 which it is as hard to be patient as about the authorship of 

 Shakespeare s plays. It is easy to find all manner of bad 

 metres among these versifiers, and plenty of inconsistencies, 

 many or most of them the fault of careless or ignorant 

 transcribers, but whoever has read them thoroughly, and 



