And all thorow thy negligence and rape."
Chaucer to his own Scrivener.
If, during his own lifetime, and under his own eye, poor Chaucer was so sinned against as to provoke this humorous malediction upon the head of the delinquent, it cannot be a matter of surprise that, in the various hands his text has since passed through, many expressions should have been perverted, and certain passages wholly misunderstood. And when we find men, of excellent judgment in other respects, proposing, as Tyrwhitt did, to alter Chaucer's words to suit their own imperfect comprehension of his meaning, it is only reasonable to suspect that similar mistakes may have induced early transcribers to alter the text, wherever, to their wisdom, it may have seemed expedient.
Now I know of no passage more likely to have been tampered with in this way, than those lines of the prologue to the Persone's Tale, alluded to at the close of my last communication. Because, supposing (which I shall afterwards endeavour to prove) that Chaucer really meant to write something to this effect: "Thereupon, as we were entering a town, the moon's rising, with Min al auwâ in Libra, began to ascend (or to become visible),"—and supposing that his mode of expressing this had been,
"Therewith the mone's exaltacioun,
In libra men alawai gan ascende,
As we were entrying at a towne's end:"
—in such a case, what can be more probable than that some ignorant transcriber, never perhaps dreaming of such a thing as the Arabic name of a star, would endeavour to make sense of these, to him, obscure words, by converting them into English. The process of transition would be easy; "min" or "men" requires little violence to become "mene" (the modern "mean" with its many significations), and "al auwâ" (or "alwai," as Chaucer would probably write it) is equally identical with "alway." The misplacement of "Libra" might then follow as a seeming necessity; and thus the line would assume its present form, leaving the reader to understand it, either with Urry, as,
"I mene Libra, that is, I refer to Libra;"
or with Tyrwhitt: