self. This I
may do by reference to a passage in "The Marchante's Tale," which evinces a
remarkable want of perception not only in Tyrwhitt, but in all the editors
of Chaucer that I have had an opportunity of consulting.

The morning of the garden scene is said in the text to be "er that dayes
eight were passed of the month of _Juil_"--but, a little further on, the
same day is thus described:

"Bright was the day and blew the firmament,
Phebus of gold his stremes doun hath sent
To gladen every flour with his warmnesse;
He was that time in Geminis, I gesse,
But litel fro his declination
In Cancer."

How is it possible that any person could read these lines and not be struck
at once with the fact that they refer to the 8th of _June_ and not to the
8th of _July_? The sun would leave Gemini and enter Cancer on the 12th of
June; Chaucer was describing the 8th, and with his usual accuracy he places
the sun "but litel fro" _the summer solstice_!

Since "Juil" is an error common perhaps to all previous editions, Tyrwhitt
might have been excused for repeating it, if he had been satisfied with
only that: but he must signalise _his edition_ by inserting in the Glossary
attached to it--"JUIL, _the month of July_," referring, as the sole {317}
authority for the word, to this very line in question of "The Marchante's
Tale!"

Nor does the proof, against him in particular, end even there; he further
shows that his attention must have been especially drawn to this garden
scene by his assertion that Pluto and Proserpine were the prototypes of
Oberon and Titania; and yet he failed to notice a circumstance that would
have added some degree of plausibility to the comparison, namely, that
Chaucer's, as well as Shakspeare's, was a _Midsummer Dream_.

It is, perhaps, only justice to Urry to state that _he_ appears to have
been aware of the error that would arise from attributing such a situation
of the sun to the month of July. The manner in which the lines are printed
in _his_ edition is this:--

"ere the dayis eight
Were passid, er' the month July befill."

It is just possible to twist the meaning of this into _the eighth of the
Kalends of July_, by which the blunder would be in some degree lessened;
but such a reading would be as foreign to Chaucer's astronomy as the lines
themselves are to his poetry.

A. E. B.

Leeds, April 8. 1851.

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