which the eighteenth century gave, by its editions and commentaries on the great writers before the couplet accession, to that historic study of actual English prosody which is the one thing needful. It is scarcely hyperbole to say that a man who will take Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, to a lodge in some vast wilderness, read them and use his wits on them without prejudice and without precedent theory, can hardly fail to hit on the truth of the whole matter-that even short of this, study of any of them may, and probably will, give him light and leading. Spenser and Milton needed no great editorial aid, for they had both (with whatever exceptions in Milton's case) seen their work in print, if they had not actually seen it through the press. But Shakespeare was not very well served by his early editors and printers, and Chaucer was very ill served by some of his. In endeavouring to set things right, the early eighteenth-century editors of Shakespeare no doubt patched and pieced too much; but still they removed many obvious, and some not so obvious, copyists' and printers' blunders. Until Tyrwhitt it was difficult for any one, not a rather exceptional scholar, to understand Chaucer's prosody at all.

How great was the assistance to prosodic study of this editorial labour, and of the study in well or badly edited copies of the literature of the past generally, may be seen by comparing the two editions of Mitford's Harmony. The first may please students of the "previous question" better, with its wide-ranging theory; the second, though cramped perhaps a little by that theory, is still the first honest attempt to take the facts of the subject from the beginning, and at least adjust theory to them. Previously this could not be done. Of the beneficent effects of the process the only process really possible or profitablewe have seen something in Chatterton; we are postponing two other examples-in practice, not in theory,those of Burns and Blake. But it is necessary to remember that all the great writers of the Romantic movement were affected by this resurrection of the past.

For in these studies, as in almost all others of the human kind, the future is merely a blank, and the present is partly a puzzle. In them, more than in others, the past is a possession. We have it, and if we choose we may know and understand it. Without such knowledge we shall never decipher the puzzle of the present, or be ready to understand the writing that is to fill the blank of the future. With it we have kept our hold on the life of the subject, and are prepared for whatever that life may bring.

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INDEX