each case; a number of ten syllables; but the great majority of nine, many of eight and two which may be of seven. I cannot see sufficient analogy between the forms-even granting ignorance of the valued 'e'-to justify a claim of relationship.

A much closer analogy with the Spenserian form is afforded by the octosyllabic couplet, as used by Chaucer. This was not new with him, having been employed, with slight freedom in equivalence, in Gower's Confessio Amantis. It is used by Chaucer in Romaunt of the Rose, Book of the Duchess, and Hous of Fame. The latter's form shows greater variation. His syllables vary from 7 to 11; in the Book of the Duchess, the per cent. is:

The number of feet also varies: of the first fifty lines, 1 is possible (though not likely) as five feet; 40 are four feet; 4 are clearly three feet; and 5 may be either three or four. This is, with one variation, similar to the Spenserian form as outlined before.

There is one objection to this theory, namely, the presence in Spenser of five foot lines. There are about a dozen five foot lines scattered through the three eclogs, and in May (117-122) are five consecutive five-foot lines. Nothing of this nature is to observed in Chaucer, but we do notice that he has about the same proportion of three foot lines as Spenser has of five. And in the Hous of Fame (1200-1213) is an interesting passage. It is a description of harpers, and the number of feet in the lines changes as follows: 4, 4, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, giving the passage a rhythmic swing distinct from the preceding or succeeding lines. Chaucer was probably finding the four foot line, with its tendency (64%) to middle caesura, monotonous, and was seeking variation. His last poem in octosyllabic couplets, the Hous of Fame, contains more three foot lines than the other two; it is followed by the Legend of Good Women, in heroic couplets. Spenser had behind him, not only the free octosyllabic couplet, remarkably like his own, but also the newer heroic. It seems to me quite likely that he may have based the form of the February, May and September

eclogs on the former and in his own experimentation have varied it with the line almost universal in his own time, the decasyllabic iamb. Lounsbury apparently realizes that the form of the eclogs cannot be attributed to a misunderstanding of Chaucer, but to such ignorance he does lay the roughness of Mother Hubberd's Tale and of Colin Clout's Come Home Again.

He who reads, in particular, Mother Hubberd's Tale, will gain a fair conception of the way in which Chaucer sounded to the man of the Sixteenth Century. There are lines in this piece that lack the proper number of syllables. There are lines that are remarkable for nothing so much as for their lack of harmony. There are entire passages that are written thruout in what would strike us as a lame and halting meter. In a writer whose natural melody is almost cloying in its sweetness and smoothness, such a deviation from his usual practice could not be due to accident. It was adopted for no other reason than that Chaucer was believed to have furnished the example of this sort of ruggedness in the measure.

Saintsbury, we have seen, calls the same poem "impeccable riding rime throughout." There is no doubt that the meter of this poem is taken from that of Chaucer. But that it is either as regular as Saintsbury declares or as irregular as Lounsbury states, is doubtful. Lounsbury must remember that if the final 'e' were not counted, one line in every six (at least) would have seemed irregular to Spenser; is that the proportion in Mother Hubberd's Tale? After the words "lame and halting meter," Lounsbury adds in a footnote: "See, for illustration, lines 142-146, 183-188, 211-214, 515-540, etc." The poem is regular (with line 67 an Alexandrine) to line 142, when occurs:

Yet all be brethren ylike dearly bought.
There is no right in this partition

Ne was it so by institution

Ordained first, ne by the law of Nature,

But that she gave like blessing to each creture.
As well of worldly livelode as of life,

That there might be no difference nor strife.

I have given two lines more than Lounsbury mentions, to show that there is no difference between them and those adjacent. It is not good poetry, but it is regular enough iambic decasyllable, with only one strain (in the first line-brethren ylike) to maintain the flow of the rhythm. The poem is regular until the next passage

mentioned, where again I give two lines more than Lounsbury

suggests:

But this I wot withall, that we shall ronne

Into great daunger, like to bee undonne,
Thus wildly to wander in the worlds eye,
Without pasport or good warrantie,

For feare lest we like rogues should be reputed,
Or like eare marked beasts abroad be bruted.
Therefore I read that we our counsels call,
How to prevent this mischief ere it fall.

This is somewhat better verse than the last passage, but contains two genuinely irregular lines (the third and the fourth). Again there is no question of regularity until the next lines mentioned:

His breeches were made after the new cut,

Al Portuguese, loose like an empty gut,
And his hose broken high above the heeling,
And his shoes beaten out with traveling.

The lines just given, tho mainly syllabically correct, require considerable strain to wrench them into iambic meter, and are the roughest in the poem. But consideration of the subject under discussion will palliate the offense. Lowell says:

Spenser sinks now and then thru the fault of his topics into unmistakable prose. Take his description of the House of Alma, for instance:

"The master cook was called Concoction,
A careful man and full of comely guise;
The kitchen clerk that hight Digestion
Did order all the achates in seemly wise,"

and so on through all the organs of the body.
Spenser begins Mother Hubberd's Tale:

No muses aide me needes hereto to call;
Base is the style, and matter meane withall.

and ends it:

So Mother Hubberd her discourse did end.
Which pardon me, if I amisse have pend,
For weake was my remembrance it to hold,

And bad her tongue, that it so bluntly told.

Spenser apologizes for Mother Hubberd's bad tongue, just as in the Mirror for Magistrates intentionally rough passages are apologized

for on the ground that the speaker was uncouth. Does not the ardent desire of the period for decorum, and the classic tradition of roughness in satire, sufficiently explain the few irregularities in this poem-far too few for any analogy with that Chaucer of the unsounded 'e'?

For there are in the entire poem perhaps six irregularities, other than those in common use (feminine rime, equivalence, first foot a trochee). The last passage mentioned as rough by Lounsbury is as regular as can be, and as good poetry as most of the tale. A brief analysis will bear this out:

standard of poetic worth The other irregularities

A glance at the text will show that the is equal to that of the rest of the poem. suggested by the "etc." of Lounsbury I have sought, and found— three lines, 734, 1015, and 1144 (the last of which might be a rare use of the valued final 'e' by Spenser: "But through his hand

must passe the fiaunt"). Admitting that it does not qualify for a position among the noblest pieces of the English tongue-that its style is confessedly 'low '-we find surprisingly few irregularities 13 in Mother Hubberd's Tale. To say that its heroic couplet has Chaucer as model is to assert the obvious, for all English heroic couplet springs from Chaucer; to state that in the variation of his caesura and in other liberties Spenser followed his predecessor's example is to maintain the expected, for these are looked for to maintain liberty from stringent rule of thumb without degenerating into license; but to claim that the second form is derived by error from the first is to reveal slight consideration of the closeness of the analogy between them, and to disregard the implications, the intelligence and the technical mastery of one of our greatest poets. It is likely that Spenser was aware of the sounding of the Chaucerian "e"; it seems certain that in his use of the octosyllabic and the heroic couplet he is purposeful, understanding, correct.

Columbia University.

18 The irregularity in the second passage quoted by Lounsbury is of the sort given by Gascoigne in his example, and of the sort we today see in Chaucer. No question of final 'e' makes it proof of Spenser's ignorance; rather does it-if anything-show his close observation of his 'father Tityrus.'