a jewel.

It is, however, but too manifest from his alleged versions, that not
only did Mr Lipscomb of necessity eschew the perusal of "the books,
trifling as they may seem, to which it would be necessary to refer to
illustrate the manners of the 14th century," but that he continued to
his dying day almost as ignorant of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as of
Dryden's Fables.

In his preface he tells one very remarkable falsehood. "The Life of
Chaucer, and the Introductory Discourse to the Canterbury Tales, are
taken from the valuable edition of his original works published by Mr
Tyrwhitt." The Introductory Discourse is so taken; but it is plain that
poor, dear, fibbing Willy Lipscomb had not looked into it, for it
contradicts throughout all the statements in the life of Chaucer, which
is not from Tyrwhitt, but clumsily cribbed piecemeal by Willy himself
from that rambling and inaccurate one by a Mr Thomas in Urry's edition.
Lipscomb is lying on our table, and we had intended to quote a few
specimens of him and his predecessor Ogle; but another volume that had
fallen aside a year or two ago, has of itself mysteriously
reappeared--and a few words of it in preference to other "haverers."

Mr Horne, the author of "The False Medium," "Orion," the "Spirit of the
Age," and some other clever brochures in prose and in verse, in the
laboured rather than elaborate introduction to "The Poems of Geoffrey
Chaucer, modernized," (1841,) by Leigh Hunt, Wordsworth, Robert Bell,
Thomas Powell, Elizabeth Barrett, and Zachariah Azed, gives us some
threescore pages on Chaucer's versification; but, though they have an
imposing air at first sight, on inspection they prove stark-naught. He
seems to have a just enough general notion of the principle of the verse
in the Canterbury Tales; but with the many ways of its working--the how,
the why, and the wherefore--he is wholly unacquainted, though he
dogmatizes like a doctor. He soon makes his escape from the real
difficulties with which the subject is beset, and mouths away at immense
length and width about what he calls "the _secret_ of Chaucer's rhythm
in his heroic verse, which has been the baffling subject of so much
discussion among scholars, a trifling increase in the syllables
occasionally introduced for variety, and founded upon the same laws of
contraction by apostrophe, syncope, &c., as those followed by all modern
poets; but employed in a more free and varied manner, all the words
being f