360 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



folio manuscript. Above all, he was a most conscien- 

 tious editor, and an accurate one so far as was possible 

 with the lights of that day. Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted 

 two poems, " The Squyr of Low Degre " and " The 

 Knight of Curtesy," which had already been edited by 

 Ritson. The former of these has passages that are un- 

 surpassed in simple beauty by anything in our earlier 

 poetry. The author of it was a good versifier, and Rit- 

 son, though he corrected some glaring errors, did not 

 deal so trenchantly with verses manifestly lamed by the 

 copyist as perhaps an editor should.* Mr. Hazlitt says 

 of Ritson's text, that " it offers more than an hundred 

 departures from the original," and of the "Knight of 

 Courtesy," that " Ritson's text is by no means accurate." 

 Now Mr. Hazlitt has adopted nearly all of Ritson's 

 emendations, without giving the least hint of it. On 

 the contrary, in some five or six instances, he gives the 

 original reading in a foot-note with an " old ed. has " so 

 and so, thus leaving the reader to infer that the correc- 

 tions were his own. Where he has not followed Ritson, 

 he has almost uniformly blundered, and that through 

 sheer ignorance. For example, he prints, 

 " Alas ! it tourned to wroth her heyle," 



where Ritson had substituted wrotlierJieyle. The meas- 

 ure shows that Ritson was right. Wroth her heyle, more- 

 over, is nonsense. It should have been wrother her heyle 

 at any rate, but the text is far too modern to admit of 

 that archaic form. In the " Debate of the Body and the 

 Soul " (Matzner's A. E. Sprachproben, 103) we have, 



* For example : — 



"And in the arber was a tre 

 A fairer in the world might none be," 

 ihould certainly read, 



" None fairer in the world might be." 



