still had,
in Chaucer's day, a tendency to resolve itself into dialects; as, in the
time of the Conquest, the kingdom had still a tendency to resolve itself
into sub-kingdoms. Chaucer knew this, and was concerned about it; he was
anxious about those differences of tongue, of orthography, and of
vocabulary; he did all in his power to regularise these discordances; he
had set ideas on the subject; and, what was rare in those days, the
whims of copyists made him shudder. Nothing shows better the faith he
had in the English tongue, as a literary language, than his reiterated
injunctions to the readers and scribes who shall read his poems aloud or
copy them. He experiences already, concerning his work, the anxieties of
the poets of the Renaissance:

And for ther is so greet diversitee
In English, and in writyng of our tonge,
So preye I God, that noon miswryte thee,
Ne thee mysmetre for defaute of tonge,
And red wher-so thou be, or elles songe,
That thou be understonde I God beseche![551]

Chaucer himself looked over the transcriptions done from his original
manuscripts by his amanuensis Adam; he corrected with minute care every
fault; he calls down all manner of woe upon the "scriveyn's" head, if,
copying once more "Boece" or "Troilus," he leaves as many errors
again.[552] We seem to hear Ronsard himself addressing his supplications
to the reader: "I implore of you one thing only, reader, to pronounce
well my verses and suit your voice to their passion ... and I implore
you again, where you will see this sign: (!) to raise your voice a
little, to give grace to what you read."[553]

Chaucer's efforts were not exercised in vain; they assisted the work of
concentration. After him, the dialects lost their importance; the one he
used, the East Midland dialect, has since become the language of the
nation.

His verse, too, is the verse of the new literature, formed by a
compromise between the old and the new prosody. Alliteration, which is
not yet dead, and which is still used in his time, he does not like; its
jingle seems to him ridiculous:

I can nat geste--run, ram, ruf--by lettre.[554]

Ridiculous, too, in his eyes is the "rym dogerel" of the popular
romances of which "Sir Thopas" is the type. His verse is the rhymed
verse, with a fixed number of accents or beats, and a variable number of
syllables. Nearly all the "Tales" are written in heroic verse, rhyming
two by two in couplets and cont