militis celeberrimi Poetae Anglicani." From this union several well known New England families, among them the Higginsons and Prescotts, claim descent. Henry F. Waters, the compiler of the notes to this tree, see ibid. pp. 403, 405 in especial, assigns MS Harley 1548 as the source of his information, which reference is correct. The Harleian Catalogue says that this MS was written and tricked by Richard Mundy, and that the copy of the Visitation Book of the County of Kent which it contains, whence this genealogy is taken, is from that made and taken in 1619, 1620, 1621 by John Philpot Rouge Dragon, for William Camden Clarencieux. A note by the cataloguer says: "Herein I find many enlargements by Mr. Mundy and by Mr. Robert Dale; but mostly by the former."

C. Portraits of Chaucer

The Chaucer Society published in their second series, 1900, "The Portrai's of Geoffrey Chaucer", by M. H. Spielmann; this work was reviewed by Koch, Engl. Stud. 30: 445-50.

Spielmann attaches by far the greatest value to the halflength executed by crler of Hoccleve on the margin of leaf 91 in MS. Harley 4006. This he reproduces; reproductions are also to be found e. g. in Life Records, part II frontispiece, Skeat I, frontispiece, Garnett and Gosse's Engl. Lit. vol. I, to face p. 140. There is a description in Trial Forew. pp. 93-4, and one by Lowell in his essay on Chaucer, in My Study Windows.

Chaucer is depicted, from fancy, by painters of the Canterbury Filgrimage, see under Pictures of the Pilgrims at the close of Section III here. A bust by George Frampton, R. A., exhibited in the Royal Academy, 1903, has been placed in the Guildhall, London.

Previous partial lists of Chaucer's portraits are in the Dict. Nat. Fiog., art. Chaucer. Many allusions to portraits, usually of no authenticity, may be found in the columns of Notes and Queries.

L

D. Chaucer as a Character in Fiction

Chaucer appears as a character in Robert Greene's Vision (about 1590?); in Ben Jonson's masque of The Golden Age Restored (1615), in the first recension of Gay's Wife of Bath (see p. 298 here), in E. L. Blanchard's Friar Bacon (1863), in à Beckett and Stanfield's operetta of The Canterbury Pilgrims (1884), and in Percy Mackaye's Canterbury Pilgrims (1903). See also James White's Adventures of John of Gaunt, Dublin (1790), 2 vols., described Anglia 25 :251; and Florence Converse's novel entitled Long Will, Boston, 1903.

Landor's Imaginary Conversations include one between Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Petrarch.

I

SECTION II

THE WORKS OF CHAUCER

A. Introduction: On the Canon of Chaucer

N studying the work of a nineteenth-century poet, we have at our command a text which has been prepared for the press by the author himself or by his literary executor, so that we are secure of our data when discussing the poet's vocabulary or versepeculiarities. If in various successive editions the author introduces changes, as was true of Rossetti and Wordsworth and Tennyson, we have all those dated editions at our disposal, and an essay like Dowden's on the text of Wordsworth's poems becomes possible. But Early English verse offers us few or no such certainties. There is a sense in which it is true that we do not know what Chaucer wrote.

The works of Chaucer, written before the era of printing, have come down to us in a mass of manuscripts, mainly of the century following his death. No one of these texts appears to be in the poet's own handwriting, and notwithstanding the great amount of penwork which Chaucer's position in the Customs required of him, no written line or even signature by him has yet been discovered. (See Life Records pt. IV, pp. xxiv, 233 note, 278 note. See query in Athen. 1868 II: 370.) Further, there appears in Chaucer's case scarcely any evidence of personal effort towards an accurate reproduction of his own works, such as Macaulay has pointed out to be true of Gower; see Works of John Gower, II: clxvii. The only bits of such evidence for Chaucer are the stanza of reproof to Adam his scrivener, and the lines at the close of the Troilus, fearing its too probable "mysmetring". Our text of the poems has to be obtained from the uncorrected copies of fifteenth-century scribes made at second or third hand or even further from the original. Francis Thynne, in his Animadversions, tells of a manuscript of Chaucer, known to his father, which bore the endorsement "Examinatur Chaucer"; but, as Furnivall says, this more than invaluable manuscript has never been seen by any student. We not only have no

text in Chaucer's hand or corrected by him; we have no text which is indubitably transcribed from his copy, or of which we can trace the original.

The study of Chaucer as a narrator and literary artist is not seriously affected by these considerations, because of the very close agreement of all manuscripts in the general trend of the narrative. In some of the shorter poems the majority of the copies are identical except for the omissions and slight errors of transcription which a scribe always commits; in others there are differences in wording between one set of texts and another which lead some critics to the supposition that two versions by Chaucer were in circulation, one of which had been revised by him. See for instance under the Anelida and the Troilus, here. Some few manuscripts, again, have been deliberately altered by the copyist, as the Selden MS of the Parlement of Foules; but these isolated cases can usually be quickly recognized. So marked is the general agreement among the copies that even the keenest linguistic specialist would probably say, with Pollard (Athenaeum 1901 II: 631): “I doubt if in all the Canterbury Tales there are more than twenty lines in which it is possible for editors to adopt readings making any really important change in the sense." Compare also Temporary Preface, pp. 86-7.

But with the increasing modern interest in English philology has appeared the desire to know not merely Chaucer's general narrative trend, but also the details of his verse-command and of his language. Every day adds to the number of students who wish for a truthful text of Chaucer even more than for a readable one; and every new monograph upon Chaucer confirms such students in the belief that the truthful edition, when it arrives, will be unchanged in richness of literary texture and in melody of verse, while offering us a more exact reflection of the poet's language and of the details of his verse-technique. For such an edition we must look, not to any "editor with a good ear", but to the existing manuscript copies of the poems.

The term "manuscript" is applied roughly to various sorts of Chaucer volumes written by hand. First, there is the volume containing but one work, such as the Canterbury Tales, exccuted by a professional scribe for some wealthy patron, beautifully written and decorated with colored capitals, chapter-headings, etc., and sometimes with miniatures of the persons and scenes described. Secondly, the volume written by some firm of copyists either on commission or to be sold over their counter, and containing (say) from six to twenty works by various authors; this is often written in different hands, the workmen either relieving each other from time to time or each making a separate copy of some one work, all of which were later sewed together into a volume. Thirdly, the "commonplace-book" of a collector, written perhaps by himself,

perhaps by his amanuensis, and containing a mixed mass of anything in which he was interested,-narrative verse, didactic Latin prose, proverbs, medical and culinary receipts, prayers, notes on astrology or contemporary events, etc. Fourthly, any one of these volumes partly executed and then passed from owner to owner until it is filled with the handwriting of several generations. Fifthly, a mass of verse and prose by many authors and many copyists, not intended by the scribes as an unit, but forced into one volume by a later binder. Many of the manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis belong in the first class, as Macaulay has pointed out, loc. cit., but the copies of Chaucer's poems rarely show such care, though a few are of this sort, e. g. the Ellesmere MS of the Canterbury Tales described below, Section III B 7. The second class mentioned above may be illustrated by the MS Tanner 346 of the Bodleian Library, or by the volume described by Chaucer himself in the Wife of Bath's prologue lines 669 ff. An unusually fine example of the third class is the codex Fairfax 16 of the Bodleian Library, with which may be compared any book written by Shirley, as for instance Ashmole 59; the fourth class might be exemplified by Ff 1, 6 of the Cambridge University Library, and the fifth by Harley 78 of the British Museum. All these volumes are discussed below.

The better fifteenth-century manuscripts, as again in the case of Gower's poem, often have a colophon or a heading, sometimes both, giving the title of the work and the author; occasionally the date of completion may be added. Transcriptions of Chaucer, however, show no such system. We almost never find the date of the copy and only irregularly the name of the author; and it follows from such indefiniteness on the part of the manuscripts that we are not in certainty as to the poet's genuine works. We cannot take the testimony of every manuscript as credible, and make up the list of Chaucer's works on this evidence, because of the plain error of some manuscripts in assigning to him, for example, verse in broad Scotch and of doggerel quality. Nor can we take the testimony of any one MS as to Chaucer's exact words in any given poem; for all scribes must and do err. Two problems therefore confront the student; the determining which are the genuine writings of Chaucer, that is, the establishment of the Chaucer canon; and the determining of the genuine text of Chaucer. Only after the settlement of the former question, a settlement now virtually complete, can Chaucer's use of his sources and his artistic methods be discussed; and upon the settlement of the latter problem depends our knowledge of his language and his verse.

The establishment of the canon of Chaucer, a work of many years and still not complete in minor details, has been arrived at by the utilization of several sorts of evidence. Having no text in the poet's hand, and knowing little or nothing of the scribes who copied