ord, with a quite alien meaning and use, (--_e.g._ for lengthening a
foregoing vowel--softening an antecedent consonant,)--or with none, and
through the pure casualty of negligence or of error, might at any time
be pressed irregularly into metrical service. Assuredly Chaucer never
used such blind and wild license of straightening his measure; but an
instructed eye sees in the Canterbury Tales--and in all his poetry of
which the text is incorrupt--the uniform application of an intricate and
thoroughly critical rule, which fills up by scores, by hundreds, or by
thousands, the time-wronged verses of "the Great Founder" to true
measure and true music.

To sum up in a few words our own views--First, if you take NO account of
the mute E, the great majority of Chaucer's verses in the only
justifiable text--Tyrwhitt's Canterbury Tales--are in what we commonly
call the TEN-syllabled Iambic metre.

Secondly, if you take account of the metrical E, the great majority of
them appear, if you choose so to call them, as ELEVEN-syllabled Iambic
verses, or as the common heroic measure with a supernumerary terminal
syllable.

Thirdly, if you take NO account of the disputed E, a very large number
of the verses, but less apparently than the majority, appear as wanting
internally one or two syllables.

Fourthly, if you take account of the said troublesome E, almost
universally these deficient measures become filled up to the due
complement--become decasyllabic or hendecasyllabic, as the case may be.

Fifthly, if you consent to take account of this grammatical metrical E,
no inconsiderable number of the verses--ten-syllabled or
eleven-syllabled, by technical computation--acquire one or two
supernumerary syllables distributed, if one may so speak, _within_ the
verse--and to be viewed as enriching the harmony without distorting or
extending the measure, after the manner of the _Paradise Lost_.

Finally, (for the present,) whether the verses in general fall under our
usual English scheme of the one-syllabled ending, or end, as the Italian
for the most part do, dissyllabically, has been disputed by those who
agree in the recognition of the metrical E. To wit--shall the final E of
Mr Guest's rule, ending the verse, and where it would, consequently,
make a hypercatalectic eleventh syllable, still be pronounced--as
Tyrwhitt, although not anxiously, contends? If the grammatical rule is
imperative within the verse, as much, one would think, must