poems above-mentioned, and then reconstruct from Fairfax-Bodley and Tanner the text of the BoDuchesse as it stood in Oxford (see p. 338 here). He will then have the readings of Fairfax-Bodley for one poem, the readings of the Oxford archetype for the other; and from notes on the kinds of error peculiar to each of these types (notes drawn from study of all the texts contained in them) he would then be able to introduce conjectural emendation of the "Oxford" type of error, to which he has in these cases no external MS evidence as check. See Mod. Lang. Notes 23: 20-21.

The four-beat line is used by Chaucer in couplets in these two poems, and in other metres only in stanzas inserted into the BoDuchesse, lines 475-485, on which see under that poem, Section IV here; also, combined with shorter lines, in the Rime of Sir Thopas, six-line stanzas; also, combined with five-beat lines, in the fifth stanza of both strophe and antistrophe of the complaint of Anelida.

Licences or variants are discussed by Schipper, Engl. Metrik I: 280-82. See Saintsbury, Hist. Eng. Prosody I:146.

The Five-beat Line.

Prototypes of Chaucer's five-beat line have been found by Schipper in thirteenth century English verse; see his Engl. Metrik I: 436, his Grundriss p. 207. Skeat III: 383 finds prototypes of Chaucer's five-beat couplet in the French of Machault, see Schipper, Engl. Metrik I: 453; Skeat VI : lxxxix says that Chaucer learned from Italian to vary the place of his pause, but lays no stress on Boccaccio and Dante as the possible inspirers of this form of verse. Ten Brink, Sprache und Versk. § 305 (note), hesitates to follow Schipper in identifying certain Middle English lines as the earliest examples of Chaucer's heroic verse; Schipper, Grundriss p. 207, comments on this. For ten Brink's recognition of Italian influence, and Tyrwhitt's remark, see p. 486 above.

The five-beat line is used by Chaucer in couplets, as in the Legend of Good Women and in most of the Canterbury Tales. It is combined in the Troilus into seven-line stanzas, a form borrowed from Old French poetry, see Schipper, Engl. Metrik I : 426. It is combined into eight-line stanzas in the Monk's Tale, the Former Age, etc.; this also is a form common in French, see Schipper, Engl. Metrik I: 428. The eight-line stanza with rime-arrangement as in the Italian ottava rima does not appear in Chaucer. The decasyllabic line also appears in nine-line stanzas rarely, two cases in the complaint of Anelida and one in the Mars; once it is found in a ten-line stanza, the envoy to the Venus; it is combined in six-line stanzas in the envoy to the Clerk's Tale; in a five-line stanza, the genuineness of which has been doubted, as envoy to Purse, see under that heading, Section IV here; also in an imperfectly preserved roundel near the close of the Parlement of Foules. In the (perhaps genuine) Ballad of Pity, or Complaint to his Lady, occurs a brief example of terza rima; see Section V here.

The nine and ten-line stanzas are treated by Schipper, Engl. Metrik I: 430, as original forms; the six-line is a French form, see ibid. p. 425. For the roundel-structure and origin see ibid. p. 431; for the "ballad" see ibid. III:927, I: 426 ff.

Skeat, in his list of Chaucer's stanzas, VI: lviii ff., includes examples from Merciless Beaute, Against Women Unconstant, Womanly Noblesse, To Rosemounde. The authenticity of these poems is not unquestioned, see Section V here.

The possible variants of the five-beat line are discussed by Schipper, Engl. Metrik I : 440 ff., Grundriss pp. 208-210, ten Brink, Sprache und Versk. § 307 ff., Skeat VI: lxxxii ff. Schipper's list of points requiring consideration is, hovering accent, reversal of accent, lack of upbeat, double upbeat and double unaccented syllable, elision or suppression of syllables, the cesura.

While maintaining Chaucer's debt to Boccaccio and to Dante in the treatment of the five-beat line, I would assert his own probable originality in the five-beat couplet. It is unnecessary to search the works of medieval French poets for isolated examples of such a metre, or even to insist upon the fact that Chaucer had been writing tensyllabled couplets at the ends of his seven-line stanzas, while Boccaccio used a similar couplet to close his eight-line stanzas, so well known to Chaucer. Given a man of great artistic ability, as was Chaucer, and the passage from the familiar four-beat couplet through the five-beat line to the writing of five-beat couplets is not so difficult as to require explanation.

E. Modes of Varying the Line-Flow

1. The Cesura.

Mayor, in his Chapters on English Metre, ed. 1901 p. 303, says of the "caesura" of classical metres, "It is essential to the harmony of a line that some one or more of its feet should be divided between two different words. This division is called caesura or 'cutting.' There are two kinds of caesura, the masculine, strong, or monosyllabic caesura, where only the first syllable of the foot is in the preceding word; and the feminine, weak, or trochaic caesura, where the first two syllables of a dactyl are in the preceding word, and only the remaining short syllable in the word which follows." The example given is:

Formosam resonare doces | Amaryllida silvas. Here there are strong cesuras in the second and the fourth foot, and a weak cesura in the third.

In the fourth chapter of his History of French Versification, Oxford 1903, Kastner discusses the French cesura. He defines it as "a pause in the interior of the line, dividing the line into so many parts, which pause indicates the end of a rhythmical period and enables the voice to rest after a given number of syllables."

In a note Kastner remarks that the nature of the classical cesura differs essentially from that of French verse, and that the term is not a very happy one, as applied to French verse.

verse.

It appears from the above that the classical conception of a cesura was the interplay of the speech unit and the rhythmical unit, the partial avoidance of words coinciding in form with the foot, of e. g., a dactylic movement made up of words in themselves dactyls. This conception of the cesura is however not that of Old French There it is the pause necessary during the utterance of a ten or twelve-syllabled line; a pause conditioned by the sense, or at least not incompatible with it, and usually dividing the verse very nearly in halves. Thus the classical notion of a cesura was in France replaced by the notion of the cesura; and instead of being merely the convenient name for a form of variety in verse-pattern (as in Latin), the term becomes in French the indication of a somewhat rigid physical phenomenon.

The heavy medial pause of Old English alliterative verse bears to this latter a strong resemblance; but when we examine the fivebeat line of Chaucer, we recognize a difference in his versemanagement, as compared with either Old English or Old French, which has caused critics to speak of his "movable cesura.' Thus, Schipper, Engl. Metrik I : 450; ten Brink, Sprache und Versk. § 305. The latter ascribes Chaucer's freedom in pause-position to his study of Italian, an opinion also glanced at by Skeat VI: lxxxix. Schipper in his Grundriss p. 208 (note) cites ten Brink's opinion with some doubt.

In view of Chaucer's complete departure from both the classical and the French idea of the cesura, it is hard for many of his readers to see why this terminology should be applied to him. In the examination and dissection of any single line, we may for convenience' sake speak of the position of the pause; but directly the lines are combined into Chaucer's characteristically free and flowing paragraphs, the first in the Canterbury Tales is of eighteen lines,— it seems a misnomer to speak of the position of the pause, much more of the cesura, which latter implies fixity. Thus Lowell, in his essay on Chaucer, calls the cesural pause "a purely imaginary thing in accentual metres." Yet Ellis, discussing Chaucer's "cesura", EEPron. I : 335, defines it as "the terminating of a word at the end of the second measure or in the middle of the third, or else more rarely at the end of the third or middle of the fourth measure." Inasmuch as Ellis adds that words forming a logical whole must be considered as parts of the same word (e. g., "That slepen al the night with open eye"), it is evident that to him the cesura was a sense-pause, occurring in Chaucer in one of four positions in the line. Schipper, Engl. Metrik I : 450, considers Ellis' remarks as insufficient; he finds six principal types of "cesura", with two other less frequent possibilities after the first or after the fourth beat.

This classification is termed "excellent" by Gayley and Scott in their Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism, p. 481, and has been very generally used by editors of fifteenth century texts.

The basis upon which it rests is, however, subjective. In many Chaucerian lines a distinct syntactical pause enables all students to agree upon the position of the "cesura"; and in those cases the manuscripts, our only evidence of any antiquity, usually coincide in the placing of their bar. But in many other cases the disagreement among the MSS in this respect is as marked as their textual disagreement; and we are obliged to feel that here, as in the writing or neglect of the final -e, the scribes are no sure guide. The noble Ellesmere manuscript writes:

and

So priketh hem nature in hir corages

The hooly blisful martir for to seke,

without indication of pause; but other MSS mark off the lines after nature and martir. Other lines are marked by the Ellesmere in a way contrary to the probable practice of a modern reader, e. g., line 32 of the Prologue,

That I was of hir felaweshipe anon,

a line which is marked by Schipper, op. cit. I : 458, as having its "cesura" after of, but as being one of the verses possessing, according to Schipper, an almost imperceptible ("verwischte") cesura. Nevertheless, most modern English readers would probably render the line with a slight recover of the breath after the somewhat emphatic word I.

The question of the true nature of pause in verse has never yet been settled; but it seems to many students of Chaucer as if there were a clear distinction between the pause made evident by sentence structure and the fractional delay perhaps needed to regulate the breath in a line having no logical break. There seems also to be a very marked distinction between lines containing different ideas, which require pauses of readjustment as the enumerating mind moves among them,

Trouthe and honour, fredom and curtesye,

and lines rising in an unbroken crescendo of idea to their close,

He was a verray parfit gentil knight.

In the case above mentioned, of the line having no real logical break, the point at which the delay is made must be in part dependent upon the place of rhetorical emphasis and in part upon length of preceding phrase. In fact, the whole matter, for Chaucer at least, is less position of pause than length of phrase. There is found the true variety, a variety which is discovered by study not

of line, but of paragraph. The consideration of pauses as a special feature of versification, apart from the phrases among which they occur, is as if an artist drew his line, not to indicate form, but for the sake of the line itself.

2. Reversal of Rhythm, or "Substituted Trochee." Very common in the first foot of the line:

Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage

Caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde

In the second foot:

Prol. 21

Prol. 145

Of brend gold was the caas, and eke the harneys

Kn. Tale 2038

In the third foot:

To telle yow al the condicioun

Prol. 38

Rare after the third foot; but:

And thanne his neighebour right as himselve

Prol. 535

Except at the opening of the line,-and often there also, this reversal is marked, and calls the reader's ear to the idea contained in these words. When the substituted foot is a dissyllable, especially one of mere conjunctive value, like after, under, whoso, it seems to me better to treat it, not with Schipper as a case of "hovering accent", but as one of those lighter, inconspicuous irregularities which are of no effect rhetorically, although as necessary to ideal rhythm as is regularity. When the substituted foot is however composed of two monosyllables, the effect is usually more emphatic, and brings out strongly the word-idea.

See Ellis, EEPron. I:333, Schipper, Engl. Metrik I: 459-62, Saintsbury, Hist. Eng. Prosody I : 146.

3. Elision or Slurring; Contraction or Syncope; Hiatus.

Under the name Elision, says ten Brink, Sprache und Versk. § 269, we include the various phenomena consequent upon the fusion into one syllable of a final vowel and a following initial vowel. This fusion may be complete, one vowel disappearing: Wel coude he sitte on horse and faire ryde

Prol. 94

Or a diphthongal union may result:

so mery a companye

By eterne word to dyen in prisoun

This licence is very common in Italian.

Prol. 764

Kn. Tale 251

By Contraction or Syncope is here meant the neglect in pronunciation of an unaccented medial vowel occurring after a consonant and before a liquid, a nasal, or -th.

And thenk(e)th heer com(e) th my mortal enemy
And ev(e)r he rood the hindreste of our route

Kn. Tale 785

Prol. 622