268 CHAUCER. 



tell against this fanciful notion, for one that seems, and 

 only seems, in its favor. Any one tolerably familiar with 

 the dramatists knows that in the passage quoted by 

 Coleridge, the how being emphatic, '''■how her'''' was pro- 

 nounced Iww 'r. He tells us that " Massinger is fond of 

 the anapaest in the first and third foot, as : — ■ 



' To your more | than maslculine retijson that | commands 'em ||.' 



Likewise of the second peeon {^ — ■^^) in the first foot, 

 followed by four trochees (— w), as : — 



' So greedily | long for, | know their | tltilllations.' " 



In truth, he was no fonder of them than his brother 

 dramatists who, like him, wrote for the voice by the ear. 

 " To your " is still one syllable in ordinary speech, and 

 "masculine" and "greedily" w^ere and are dissyllables 

 or trisyllables according to their place in the verse. 

 Coleridge w^as making pedantry of a very simple matter. 

 Yet he has said with perfect truth of Chaucer's verse, 

 " Let a few plain rules be given for sounding the final e 

 of syllables, and for expressing the terminations of such 

 words as ocean and nation^ &c., as dissyllables, — or let 

 the syllables to be sounded in such cases be marked by 

 a competent metrist. This simple expedient would, w^ith 

 a very few trifling exceptions, where the errors are in- 

 veterate, enable any one to feel the perfect smoothness 

 and harmony of Chaucer's verse." But let us keep wide- 

 ly clear of Latin and Greek terms of prosody ! It is also 

 more important here than even w^ith the dramatists of 

 Shakespeare's time to remember that we have to do with 

 a language caught more from the ear than from books. 

 The best school for learning to understand Chaucer's 

 elisions, compressions, slurrings-over and runnings-to 

 gether of syllables is to listen to the habitual speech of 

 rustics with whom language is still plastic to meaning, and 

 hurries or prolongs itself accordingly. Here is a contrao* 



