THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 63 



was the accepted edition of Chaucei". A second edition appear- 

 ed in 1542, notal3le foi^ including the Plovighman's Tale. That 

 attack on churchmen had never before been printed with the 

 Cantei-bury Tales. After much discussion as to whether this 

 tale was written by Chaucer, it is now rejected as spurious. 



Without entering into bibliograpical details, foreign to this 

 paper, it may be said that after Speght's Chaucer of 159S, and 

 his second edition bearing date 1602, for which he had aid from 

 Thynn, the younger, whose father had supervised the edition 

 in time of Henry VITI, already mentioned, no important 

 edition of Chaucer appeared until that of Urry in 171 1. He 

 began the work of collating fourteen manuscripts of the Can- 

 terbury Tales, but died before his task was finished. His work 

 is notable chiefly because he was the first to adoj^t modern 

 editorial methods of collating written copies of his author, and 

 because his Chaucer was the first in which the ueo s f black 

 letter type was abandoned. In 1775, Try whitt studied twenty- 

 six manuscripts for his edition of the Canterbury Tales. 

 Knowledge of English grammar has advanced long strides 

 since his day, enabling Wright and others to take him sharply 

 to task for grammatical shortcomings. Nevertheless Tyrwhitt 

 brought to his undertaking, learning, enthusiasm, poetical taste, 

 wide reading, industry, and an acute critical faculty; rare gifts 

 which won for his work praise from impartial judges. With 

 the nineteenth century came new zest for early English litera- 

 ture ; and this generation has been favoured with a band of 

 earnest Chaucerian workers and scholars. Wright, Bell, 

 Morris, Skeat, and Pollard have done excellent work by their 

 respective editions of Chaucer ; and Henry Morley, Furnivall, 

 Child, Bradshaw, Ten Brink, and Lounsbury have made 

 Chaucer and his times attractive subjects wherever English 

 books are read. 



Seventy-seven pieces, each with distinct title, have been at 

 one time or another attributed to Chaucer's authorship. Some 

 of these are flagrant impostures, making reference to events 

 which happened after Chaucer's death. The spurious Pilgrim's 

 Tale refers to the Lincolnshire insurrection, a revolt described 



