have been which Dryden
tried, and which left some thousand verses deficient by half a foot, or
a foot.

But believing Speght's text to be accurate, Dryden could not but believe
in the artlessness and irregularity of Chaucer's versification. Speght's
text is most inaccurate, and altogether undeserving of his own very high
opinion, thus expressed in the Dedication to Sir Robert Cecil--"Now,
therefore, that both by old written copies, and by Master William
Thynn's praiseworthy labours, I have reformed the whole worke, whereby
Chaucer for the most part is restored to his owne antiquitie." In _his_
Chaucer, Dryden met every where such lines as these--

"When that April with his shours sote."

"And small foules maken melodie
That slepen all night with open eie."

"It befell that season on a day."

"Ready to wend in my pilgrimage."

"That toward Canterbury would ride--
The chambres and stables weren wide."

"To tell you all the condition."

"Full worthy was he in his lords warre."

"Aboven all nations in Pruce."

"For to tell you of his array."

We suspect that there was all along a lingering tradition amongst the
learned about the virtue of the Mute E's. Vestiges of the use occur in
the poets of Elizabeth's time. Wallis, the celebrated grammarian, says,
that "with our early poets it is found that that (final) E did or did
not constitute an additional syllable, just as the stricture of the
verse required it." Urry, whose edition of Chaucer was published, not
long after his death, in 1721, knows for vocal the termination in ES, of
genitive singular and of the plural--also the past tense and participle
in ED, which, however, can hardly be thought much of, as it is a power
over one mute E that we retain in use to this day. The final E, too, he
marks for a syllable where he finds one wanted, but evidently without
any grammatical reason. Urry was an unfortunate editor. Truly does
Tyrwhitt say of him, that "his design of restoring the metre of Chaucer
by a collation of MSS., was as laudable as his execution of it has
certainly been unsuccessful." The natural causes of this ill success are
thus severely and distinctly stated, "The strange license in which he
appears to have indulged himself, of lengthening and shortening
Chaucer's words according to his own fancy, and of even adding words of
his own, without giving his readers the least notice, has made the text
of Chaucer i