FOREWORDS.

EVERY English child ought to know something about a writer who left so deep an impression on his age and on the English tongue as Geoffrey Chaucer; and the success of Chaucer for Children seems to show that not only elder, but even very young, children are capable of understanding and enjoying his poems when placed before them in a pleasant form.

In preparing a Chaucer for Schools I have responded to a demand which, I may say, has, in part at least, been created by Chaucer for Children.

The want of a similar work, adapted for school purposes, was early pointed out to me by competent authorities, and I have now been induced to reprint a large portion of the juvenile edition with new matter, but without the various coloured illustrations and woodcuts, which may very profitably be studied in connection with the present work.

Probably much of the construction and pronunciation of old English which seems stiff and obsolete to grown-up persons, appears easier to children, whose mode of talking is often very like it; and the younger they are, the less they boggle over the final e, which seems to be the grand stumbling-block to older readers. Indeed the final e comes easy naturally to children, who are used to say 'doggie,' 'horsie,' 'handie,' long before dog, horse, and hand; a peculiarity which may actually be a relic of the old Saxon pronunciation, lingering like many interesting old words among the servant class. Children's habit of saying this,' this dog, this fairy, &c., is quite Chaucerian, who habitually speaks of his characters as this knight,' or 'this Emelye,'' this yeoman,' as the case may be.

The narrative in early English poetry is almost always very simply and clearly expressed, with the same kind of repetition of facts and names which, as every parent knows, is what children most require in

story-telling. The emphasis which the final e gives to many words seems to help to impress the sentences on the memory, the sense being often shorter than the sound. I use the word 'emphasis' in the same sense as one might speak of a crotchet in music, to which you count two, being more emphatic than a quaver, to which you count one.

The difficulties arising from the orthography I have hoped to correct by placing a modernised version side by side with Chaucer's text, which can be learnt by heart, or, better, used for reference only, at choice. When it is once understood that spelling in Chaucer's day was chiefly phonetic, readers will no longer be surprised at finding the same word variously spelt: and confusion of eye or brain is remedied by the familiar spelling close at hand.

I believe that some knowledge of, or at least interest in, the domestic life and manners of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries would materially help young people in their reading of English history. The political life would often be interpreted by the domestic life, and much of that time which to a young mind forms the dryest portion of history because so unknown, and a mere list of dates and crimes, would then stand out as it really was, glorious and fascinating in its vigour and vivacity, its eager search after knowledge, its enthusiasm for beauty, bravery, and culture.

There is no clearer or safer exponent of the life of the fourteenth century, as far as he describes it, than Geoffrey Chaucer, from whom, I believe, it would be possible to ascertain the state of science in many branches, language, the Church, art, politics, society, and morals to a far fuller extent than has ever been suggested. His mine is but just opened as yet.

Chaucer is, moreover, a thoroughly religious poet, all his merriest stories having a fair moral; even those which are too coarse for modern taste are rather naïve than injurious, and his pages breathe a genuine faith in God, and a passionate sense of the beauty and harmony of the divine work. His Parson's Tale, tampered with and interpolated as it has doubtless been by some orthodox Catholic scribe, is as full of Wicliffism and true Protestant feeling as many other portions of the Canterbury Tales are full of satire against the corruption of the Church and Chaucer may be said to have striven as hard to propagate with his pen the pith of the new religious views as Albert Dürer strove with his pious pencil, long before Luther sounded the note of victory.