274 CHAUCER. 



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 prac 

 tice. Would this be likely 1 Certainly not with those ter 

 minations (like courtesie) which are questioned, and in 

 diphthongs generally. Dante took precisely the same 

 liberties. 



'Facea le stelle a noi parer piii radi," 

 ' Ne fu per fantasia giammai compreso " 

 ' Pot pi'ovve dentro all 'alta fantasia," 

 ' Solea valor e cortesia trovarsi," 

 ' Che ne 'nvogliava amor e cortesta." 



Here we have fantasl' 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 : 



" Sister and wife to Cain, Cain that first did plough." 



The cscsural pause (a purely imaginary thing in ac 

 centual metres) may be made to balance a line like this 

 of Donne's, 



" Are they not like | singers at doors for meat," 



but we defy any one 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 author 

 ship of Shakespeare's plays. It is easy to find all man 

 ner 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 



