d an editor--by a text, of which the admirable diligence,
fidelity, skill, and sound discretion, wrung energetic and unqualified
praise from the illaudatory pen of Ritson. But the Grammar of Chaucer
has yet to be fully drawn out. The profound labours of the continental
scholars, late or living, on the language that was immediate mother to
our own, the Anglo-Saxon, makes that which was in Tyrwhitt's day a thing
impossible to be done, now almost an easy adventure. Accomplished, it
would at once considerably rectify even Tyrwhitt's text. The Rules of
the Verse, which are many, and evince a systematic and cautious framing,
no less than a sensitive musical ear in the patriarch, would follow of
themselves. In the mean time, a few observations, for which the
materials lie at hand, are called for in this place, by the collision of
the two great names, Chaucer and Dryden. Dryden says--

"The verse of Chaucer, I confess, is not harmonious to us, but
it is like the eloquence of one whom Tacitus commends, it was
_auribus istius temporis accommodata_. They who lived with him,
and some time after him, thought it musical; and it continues
so, even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers of
Lidgate and Gower, his contemporaries:--there is the rude
sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and
pleasing, though not perfect. It is true, I cannot go so far as
he who published the last edition of him; for he would make us
believe the fault is in our ears, and that there were really
ten syllables in a verse where we find but nine; but this
opinion is not worth confuting; it is so gross and obvious an
error, that common sense (which is a rule in every thing but
matters of faith and revelation) must convince the reader that
equality of numbers, in every verse which we call heroic, was
either not known, or not always practised in Chaucer's age. It
were an easy matter to produce some thousands of his verses
which are lame for want of half a foot, and sometimes a whole
one, and which no pronunciation can make otherwise. We can only
say, that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that
nothing is brought to perfection at first. We must be children
before we grow men. There was an Ennius, and in process of time
a Lucilius and a Lucretius, before Virgil and Horace; even
after Chaucer there was a Spenser, a Harrin