Copyright, 1879,

BY HOUGHTON, OSGOOD & CO.

All rights reserved

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A
Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.

At the time that the present collection of the works of the British Poets was issued in Boston, there was, in the opinion of the American Editor, no text of Chaucer's poems available for use that was worthy of the poet's name, or of the standard of excellence and purity established for the series.

The deficiency has at last to a great extent been supplied through the labors of scholars connected with the Chaucer Society, of Lon. don, established by Mr. Frederick J. Furnivall, and directed by him for a series of years with a persistent and self-sacrificing generosity seldom equaled.

This learned body has made available for the use of editors a large number of manuscripts of the different poems and prose works, and notably six entire texts of the Canterbury Tales.

In the present edition advantage has been taken of these important labors, which include

investigations into the sources of Chaucer's stories, the meaning of his words, and the chronology of his poems. The arrangement devised by members of the Chaucer Society is in this edition adopted for the first time.

The text of the manuscript owned by Lord Ellesmere is now considered better than any other known, and much superior to those within the reach of editors before the Chaucer Society was originated. It forms the body of the text now presented to lovers of the great poet.

The labors of an editor who publishes a text of an author whose works appeared before the invention of printing differ in important points from those of one who prepares an edition of any publication that was put into type during its writer's lifetime. The poems of our poet, for example, cannot be printed for any but special students in exactly the form in which they exist in the manuscripts, and editors have differed essentially in the rules that they have followed in their work. Some, like John Urry, have made multitudinous arbitrary emendations and additions, while others have followed the manuscripts with more or less precision. The following are among the reasons for this diver sity.