But litel fro his declination
In Cancer."
How is it possible that any person could read these lines and not be struck at once with the fact that they refer to the 8th of June and not to the 8th of July? The sun would leave Gemini and enter Cancer on the 12th of June; Chaucer was describing the 8th, and with his usual accuracy he places the sun "but litel fro" the summer solstice!
Since "Juil" is an error common perhaps to all previous editions, Tyrwhitt might have been excused for repeating it, if he had been satisfied with only that: but he must signalise his edition by inserting in the Glossary attached to it—"Juil, the month of July," referring, as the sole
authority for the word, to this very line in question of "The Marchante's Tale!"
Nor does the proof, against him in particular, end even there; he further shows that his attention must have been especially drawn to this garden scene by his assertion that Pluto and Proserpine were the prototypes of Oberon and Titania; and yet he failed to notice a circumstance that would have added some degree of plausibility to the comparison, namely, that Chaucer's, as well as Shakspeare's, was a Midsummer Dream.
It is, perhaps, only justice to Urry to state that he appears to have been aware of the error that would arise from attributing such a situation of the sun to the month of July. The manner in which the lines are printed in his edition is this:—
"ere the dayis eight
Were passid, er' the month July befill."
It is just possible to twist the meaning of this into the eighth of the Kalends of July, by which the blunder would be in some degree lessened; but such a reading would be as foreign to Chaucer's astronomy as the lines themselves are to his poetry.