In the stanza before this we have,—
“To thee and to the philosophicall strode,
To vouchsafe [vouchësafe] there need is, to correct”;
and further on,—
“With all mine herte’ of mercy ever I pray
And to the Lord aright thus I speake and say,”
where we must either strike out the second “I” or put it after “speake.”
One often finds such changes made by ear justified by the readings in other texts, and we cannot but hope that the Chaucer Society will give us the means of at last settling upon a version which shall make the poems of one of the most fluent of metrists at least readable. Let anyone compare the “Franklin’s Tale” in the Aldine edition[18] with the text given by Wright, and he will find both sense and metre clear themselves up in a surprising way. A careful collation of texts, by the way, confirms one’s confidence in Tyrwhitt’s good taste and thoroughness.
A writer in the “Proceedings of the Philological Society” has lately undertaken to prove that Chaucer did not sound the final or medial e, and throws us back on the old theory that he wrote “riding-rime,” that is, verse to the eye and not the ear. This he attempts to do by showing that the Anglo-Norman poets themselves did not sound the e, or, at any rate, were not uniform in so doing. It should seem a sufficient answer to this merely to ask whence modern French poetry derived its rules of pronunciation so like those of Chaucer, so different from those of prose. But it is not enough to prove that some of the Anglo-Norman rhymers were bad versifiers. Let us look for examples in the works of the best poet among them all, Marie de France, with whose works Chaucer was certainly familiar. What was her practice? I open at random and find enough to overthrow the whole theory:—
“Od sa fillë[19] ke le cela—
Tut li curagës li fremi—
Di mei, fet-elë par ta fei—
La Dameiselë l’aporta—
Kar ne li sembla mië boens—
La damë l’aveit apelée—
Et la merë l’areisuna.”
But how about the elision?
“Le pali’ esgardë sur le lit—
Et ele’ est devant li alée—
Bele’ amië [cf. mië, above] ne’il me celez.
La dame’ ad sa fille’ amenée.”