other hand, Furnivall has selected for inclusion in the OneText Print, as the "best" text of each poem, Shirleyan copies of Anelida, Gentilesse, Stedfastnesse, Venus, and of course the Words to Adam. A minute examination of Shirley's texts, with a view to learning whether his constant variations are due to memory transcription, desire for clearness and emphasis, or the progressive breaking-up of the inflexional system utilized by Chaucer, is a desideratum in the textual study of the Minor Poems. See my suggestions in Anglia 30 : 320-348. That Shirley wrote his codices with his own hand is stated in the verse table of contents prefixed to Adds. 16165, cp. also the table of contents to another (lost) MS preserved by Stow in Adds. 29729. The former is printed by Gaertner, op. cit. p. 63. The Chaucer Society has reproduced a page of Adds. 16165 in its Autotypes, and two pages of the Harvard volume are reproduced by Robinson, Harvard Studies V. Another mark of a Shirleyan codex is the long "gossippy" headings, for specimens of which see Ch. Soc. PT 101, 146, SPT p. 47. His spelling is also an idiosyncrasy, his elike for alike, his beon, seon, for been, seen, his nuwe, nexst, for newe, next, etc. See the Ch. Soc. prints; see Skeat I : 76, Schick, Temple of Glass pp. xxii-xxiv. MSS not in his hand, as especially Harley 7333, thus may show traces of a Shirley origin in their spelling and headings. From the character of those headings, his tables of contents with their instructions to return the book, and his pedagogical marginal notes, I have inferred that he was a semi-professional lender of books. He also dabbled in verse-making and executed translations himself, see the lines sent to him by Sellyng, transcribed in Harley 7333, and the contents of Adds. 5467 as described by Gaertner op. cit.; cp. also his verse-tables of contents and his Chronicle, for which latter see Section V here. According to John Stow's note, Survey ed. Thoms. 1876, p. 140, some of Shirley's MSS passed to him: "I haue seene them, and partly do possess them." The Shirley MS at Trinity College, Cambridge, was for some time in Stow's custody, and from it he made many copies, preserved to us in his MS Adds. 29729; the MS Harley 2251 is also in part derived from the Trinity MS, see Anglia 28: 1 ff.; Ashmole 59 was at some time annotated by Stow. The existence of other Shirley codices, now lost, is discussed in Anglia 30 : 320-348. William Caxton, 1422?-1491?: Born in Kent, apprenticed to a London mercer, settled in Flanders soon after to enlarge his commercial experience, and remained there from about 1441 to about 1476. Here he rose to the important post of Governor of the English trading colony, and was thus brought into contact with the reigning House of Burgundy. At this time the chivalric and literary brilliance of the Burgundian court was at its height; Caxton's interest in romantic fiction, probably already warm, was greatly stimulated by the English born Duchess Margaret of Burgundy, who encouraged his efforts at translation and compilation. The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, translated by Caxton from French into English, was presented to the duchess about 1471. Caxton then seems to have resigned his official position, and entered Margaret's service. So many copies of the Recuyell were in demand that, as Caxton tells us in the epilogue to its third book, published about 1474, he was obliged to turn to the new art of printing to supply would-be readers. He mastered the craft, returned to England, set up his press at Westminster in 1477, and devoted the rest of his life to the publication of romances, devotional books, didactic manuals, and poetry; his labors as a printer were more than paralleled by his work as translator and compiler. His business success was great; he was favored of king and court; and his probity and piety are most interestingly revealed in his various prefaces and epilogues, especially the famous proheme to the second edition of the Canterbury Tales. Though the pioneer in England of the great art of democracy, Caxton used it to the preservation of the most aristocratic of literary forms; and thus, as Raleigh says (The English Novel, 1894, p. 18) "secured to English literature continuity of development.” His bits of original writing by way of epilogues and introductions have value in themselves as monuments of English prose. He is probably best remembered by his Recuyell, his Golden Legend, his two editions of the Canterbury Tales, and his publication of Malory's Morte d'Arthur; but there remain, whole or in fragments, about 100 works from his press. The value of a Caxton, or of even a few leaves of a Caxton, is now enormous. Quaritch prices the perfect copy of the second edition of the Canterbury Tales which is in his hands at £2500. For notes on Caxton see: The Biography and Typography of William Caxton. W. Blades. London, 2 vols., 4to, 1861-63, condensed into I vol. octavo 1877, second ed. 1882. Some additions and corrections to Blades may be found in Gordon Duff's William Caxton, pubd. by the Caxton Club of Chicago, 1905; cp. also the Athen. 1894 II:715 1895 I: 284, 474, 772; 1896 I:283, 346, 779, II: 129; 1898 I:661; 1899 I : 371. On Caxton's two eds. of the Canterbury Tales see Hammond in Mod. Phil. 3: 159 ff. Various of Caxton's texts have been reprinted by the Early English Text Society, see their list of publications; some prefaces and epilogues are in Flügel's Neuenglisches Lesebuch; the Cambridge University Press has issued a facsimile of his print of Anelida; for his conclusion to the House of Fame see under that heading, Section IV here. The edition of the Canterbury Tales by de Worde in 1498, which differs from the Caxtons, has not yet been examined. From 1500 to the 18th century there were but three editors of Chaucer,-Thynne, Stow, and Speght; for each of these see under his edition of the works, Section II D here. Lewis Theobald, died 1744. Churton Collins, in a paper on The Porson of Shaksperean Criticism, included in his Essays and Studies, rehabilitates the reputation of Theobald, pointing out the debt which the present text of Shakspere owes to Theobald's scholarship and insight, and giving an ample list of his emendations. Collins speaks of Theobald's knowledge of Early English and Anglo-Saxon, and of his "frequent and apt quotations from the Canterbury Tales." An examination of Theobald's edition of Shakspere (1733) reveals no large amount of Chaucerian scholarship. I find the following: wordnotes on bale in Coriolanus and on housel and eisel in Hamlet; emendations supported by the Chaucerian text are weyward to weird in Macbeth, y'are to yare in Cymbeline, grey as grass to grey as glass in the Two Gent. of Verona, would woman to wood woman in the same play, stricture to strict ure in Measure for Measure. On Troilus and Cressida Theobald comments that Shakspere took more from Caxton's print of the Troy-legend than from "Lollius or Chaucer"; his only note implying Shakspere's knowledge of the text of Chaucer-and that perhaps also his best note on Chaucer-is the remark on Twelfth Night, Act II, Sc. 4, "Patience on a monument Smiling at grief", of which Theobald says that Shakspere perhaps had in mind Chaucer's Parlement of Foules: Dame Pacience sitting there I fonde Upon which passage it may be noted that the "hill of sand" is Theobald also compares As You Like It with Gamelyn, and refers the Twelfth Night line, "Cressida was a beggar", to the (pseudo-Chaucerian) Testament of Cressida. Taken altogether, these constitute no large body of Chaucerian notes; but though the “frequency” of Theobald's references to Chaucer may be doubted, there is no question of their "aptness", nor of the unusualness of his knowledge at that period. He may be compared with Tyrwhitt for his abundance of classical learning, perhaps even in his English reading; and there is a parallel also in the sagacity and sobriety with which each scholar executed his selfappointed task. Henry Bradshaw, 1831-1886. Head of the University Library, Cambridge, from 1867 until his death. The only piece of Chaucer work which Bradshaw published is included in his Collected Papers (posthumous); and Prothero, in the Dict. Nat. Biog., says of Bradshaw, "The amount of his published work is smail, and the reputation which he enjoyed among his contemporaries will be almost unintelligible to those who never knew him, and who are unaware how much of his labour took shape in the productions of others." As a bibliographer, a specialist in ecclesiastical antiquities, and in the work of the early printers, Bradshaw was second to none in his generation. A memoir by Prothero was published Cambridge 1889, and a most intimate and sympathetic paper is in A. C Benson's Essays, 1896, pp. 252267. See Blades' Caxton pp. 55, 295, Lounsbury, Studies I: 267, Acad. 1886 I : 130, 147. Bernhard ten Brink, 1841-1892. Born in Amsterdam, but educated in Germany, and professor in a German university from 1865 until his death; from 1873 on, a professor in the University of Strassburg. He published his Chaucer Studien in 1870, his Chaucers Sprache und Verkunst in 1884; both are fundamental for the student. His history of English literature, also of great value for the worker in Early English, was interrupted by his death. A full bibliography of his writings may be found in Engl. Stud. 17: 186-7, following a brief sketch of his life and work by Kölbing, from which these facts are taken. James Russell Lowell, born in Cambridge, U. S. A., in 1819, died in 1891. Lowell's study of Chaucer, like his paper on Dante, is of the character of a literary essay, written, however, with ripe fulness of knowledge and penetrant appreciation. This essay was originally published in the North American Review for July 1870; it is included in the volume of Lowell's works entitled My Study Windows. No student of Chaucer can afford to overlook this paper; see Furnivall, Trial Forew. p. 28, and the dedication to that work. Lowell's earlier Conversations on the English Poets (1845) also included a paper on Chaucer. Essays on Chaucer by other writers are of a far different character, and the mass of thirdhand and usually slight papers on various aspects of Chaucer's life and art to be found in the lesser literary journals are not here catalogued; see Poole's Index. Collections of studies or notes are:-the Chaucer Society's Essays on Chaucer (twenty-two papers published in six parts in their second Series), many of which are now of small value; the Studies in Chaucer by Lounsbury, noted in the Reference List here; the volume of papers upon Chaucer pubd. by the Royal Historical Society in 1900 as the Chaucer Memorial Lectures, under the editorship of Percy W. Ames. The contents of this last are:introd. by the editor.-The Contemporaries of Chaucer, by H. M. Imbert-Terry.-The Paston Letters, with special reference to the social life of the XIV and XV centuries, by Samuel Davey.Italian Influence on Chaucer, by W. E. A. Axon.-The Portraits of Geoffrey Chaucer (with illustrations), by M. H. Spielmann.— The Life and Characteristics of Chaucer, by Percy W. Ames.None of these Essays, except that by Spielmann, has any independent value; Spielmann's was also pubd. by the Chaucer Society, 2d series, No. 31. The volume is revd. Athen. 1900 II: 440. Works of some extent upon Chaucer are:-Matthew Browne's Chaucer's England, London 1889, 2 vols. This set of papers, written by W. B. Rands under the pseudonym above, is still of value and interest.-F. G. Fleay's Guide to Chaucer and Spenser, London 1877, is very severely reviewed by Furnivall, Acad. 1877 II: 525.-Chaucer's Liv og Digtning, by Jespersen, Copenhagen 1893, I have not seen.-Root's Poetry of Chaucer is mentioned in the Reference List here. Shorter papers are the essay of Mrs. Browning, in her Book of the Poets, 1842, 1863, the Chaucer-portion of which was reprinted in Ch. Soc. Essays, part II; the papers of Alexander Smith in his Dreamthorp, London 1863, of Hazlitt in his Essays on the English Poets, and of Swinburne in the Fortnightly Review 1880 II: 708. The reviews of Skeat by Quiller Couch and by Ker, reprinted as essays in their Adventures in Criticism and Essays in Medieval Literature, are entered under their proper place in this book. Francis James Child, born in Boston, U. S. A., in 1825, died 1896. He entered Harvard College in 1842, took a foremost place among his classmates, and upon graduation entered the service of his college, in which he remained until his death. During a leave of absence he studied in Germany, but sought no doctor's degree; this was later conferred on him by Göttingen. His post at Harvard for 25 years was the professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory; in 1876 the special chair of English was founded, and Child became its first incumbent. He was the general editor of the series of British Poets (about 150 vols.), published at Boston from 1853 on, and prepared for this his Spenser, which appeared in 1855. The edition of Chaucer was to have been from his hand, but he abandoned the project, thinking the time not ripe. He published, however, in 1863, in the Memoirs of the American Academy, his laborious paper entitled "Observations on the Language of Chaucer", a work which marks an epoch in the study of the poet, and in which "he not only defined the problems and provided many solutions, but gave a perfect model of method." Skeat has said that "it ought never to be forgotten that the only full and almost complete solution of the question of the right scansion of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is due to |