d Grecian, ancient and modern; so that
although he names Sunday and Monday as two of the days of the week in
Athens, he does so evidently for the purpose of introducing the allocation
of the hours, alluded to before, to which the planetary names of the days
of the week were absolutely necessary. But in the fifty weeks appointed by
Theseus, the very same love of a little display of erudition would lead
Chaucer to choose the _hebdomas lunae_, or lunar quarter, which the Athenian
youth were wont to mark out by the celebration of a feast to Apollo on
every seventh day of the moon. But after the first twenty-eight days of
every lunar month, the weekly reckoning must have been discontinued for
about a day and a half (when the new moon was what was called "in coitu,"
or invisible), after which a new reckoning of sevens would recommence.
Hence there could be but four hebdomades in each lunar month; and as there
are about twelve and a half lunar months in a solar year, so must there
have been fifty lunar weeks in one solar year.

It will explain many anomalies, even in Shakspeare, if we suppose that our
early writers were content to show their knowledge of a subject in a few
particulars, and were by no means solicitous to preserve, what moderns
would call _keeping_, in the whole performance.

The next difficulty, adverted to by [Greek: e]., is the mention of the
THIRD as the morning upon which Palamon "brake his prison," and Arcite went
into the woods "to don his observaunce to May."

There is not perhaps in the whole of Chaucer's writings a more exquisite
passage than that by which the latter circumstance is introduced; it is
well worth transcribing:--

"The besy larke, the messager of day,
Sal[=e]weth in hire song the morw[=e] gray;
And firy Phebus riseth up so bright,
That all the orient laugheth at the sight;
And with his strem[=e]s drieth in the greves
The silver drop[=e]s hanging on the leves."

Such is the description of the morning of the "thridde of May;" and
perhaps, if no other mention of that date were to be found throughout
Chaucer's works, we might be justified in setting it down as a random
expression, to which no particular meaning was attached. But when we find
it repeated in an entirely different poem, and the same "observaunce to
May" again associated with it, the conviction is forced upon us that it
cannot be without some definite meaning.

This repetition occurs in the opening of the second