INTRODUCTION.

THE purpose of the present edition of Chaucer's Legende of Goode Women is to furnish an easy text-book for beginners in the study of early English literature. To this end, the explanatory notes have been made copious; and it is believed that they will be found to embrace and illustrate every peculiarity of Chaucer's language, the difficulties of which, the student, after a few days' reading, with the aid here afforded, will find to be far more apparent than real. The comparatively few obsolete words which are sprinkled over the surface of Chaucer's pages, together with his antiquated orthography, have deterred many from attacking what appeared at first sight to require more time and study to master than they were able to bestow. The old poet has accordingly been entirely neglected by some, while others have taken up with modernized versions of his works. But the true spirit of his poetry can be reached only through its original language, and not through modernized versions, which convey, however well done, no adequate conception of its subtler elements. The life, the soul of all poetry, is inseparable from its form, and this is especially true of Chaucer's poetry. What is addressed to the insulated understanding can be equally well expressed in any cultivated language; but poetry, whose domain is the sensibilities, owes its peculiar potency to the form in which it was originally conceived by the poet's imagination. Divorced from this, its essence evaporates, and but little more remains than the

mere thought which is secreted in it, and which by itself is not poetry at all. Another serious loss incurred by resorting to modernized versions, is the valuable knowledge to be derived from the original, of the roots and formation of our noble tongue, which "in force, in richness, in aptitude for all the highest purposes of the poet, the philosopher, and the orator, is inferior to that of Greece alone."

To possess an intimate acquaintance with the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, in its original form, is the duty, as it is one of the high privileges, of every cultivated Englishman and Anglo-American, who would know the elements, resources, and capabilities of his native language. Five hundred years and more have passed since Chaucer commenced to write, and four hundred and sixty-three years, this October, since his death in the concluding year of the fourteenth century. During this period, English literature has been enriched by immortal works of genius, that have eclipsed the masterpieces of all other literatures, both ancient and modern; and yet, at this hour, Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote with no native models before him, and who, out of a semibarbarous medley of Saxon and Norman French, was obliged to mould his language and poetic forms, continues to rank with the greatest poets and literary princes of his country. He has lost nothing, but rather gained, by the increase of civilization and culture. He has more readers in the present generation than in any previous one; and his language and the secrets of his harmonies are now perhaps better understood and appreciated than they were even in the reign of Elizabeth, which was nearer by almost three centuries to his own times.

"It is in Chaucer we touch the true height, and look abroad into the kingdoms and glories of our poetical literature, it is with Chaucer that we begin our 'Books of the Poets,' our collections and selections, our pride of place and And the genius of the poet shares the character of his position: he was made for an early poet, and the meta

name.