266 CHAUCER. 



Make of your wifehood no comparison ; 

 Hide ye your beauties Ysoude and Elaine, 

 My lady cometh, that all this may distain." 



When I remember Chaucer's malediction upon his scriv- 

 ener, and consider that by far the larger proportion of 

 his verses (allowing always for change of pronunciation) 

 are perfectly accordant with our present accentual sys- 

 tem, I cannot believe that he ever wrote an imperfect 

 line. His ear would never have tolerated the verses of 

 nine syllables, with a strong accent on the first, at- 

 tributed to him by Mr. Skeate and Mr. Morris. Such 

 verses seem to me simply impossible in the pentameter 

 iambic as Chaucer wrote it. A great deal of misappre- 

 hension would be avoided in discussing English metres, 

 if it were only understood that quantity in Latin and 

 quantity in English mean very different things. Perhaps 

 the best quantitative verses in our language (better even 

 than Coleridge's) are to be found in Mother Goose, com- 

 posed by nurses wholly by ear and beating time as they 

 danced the baby on their knee. I suspect Chaucer and 

 Shakespeare would be surprised into a smile by the 

 learned arguments which supply their halting verses 

 with every kind of excuse except that of being readable. 

 When verses were written to be chanted, more license 

 could be allowed, for the ear tolerates the widest devia- 

 tions from habitual accent in words that are sung. 

 Segnius irritant demissa per aurem. To some extent the 

 same thing is true of anapaestic and other tripping 

 measures, but we cannot admit it in marching tunes like 

 those of Chaucer. He wrote for the eye more than for 

 the voice, as poets had begun to do long before.* Some 



* Froissart's description of the book of trace's amoureux et de 

 moralite", which he had had engrossed for presentation to Richard II. 

 in 1394, is enough to bring tears to the eyes of a modern author. " Et 

 lui plut tres grandement; et plaire bien lui devoit car il 6tait enlumin^ 



