few antiquaries whose opinions are entitled to greater respect upon this or any other point to which he has devoted his talents and attention. Can we doubt, then, the success of a plan which has met with such general approbation, and is undertaken with so praiseworthy an object,—an object which may well be described in the words which Weever used when stating the motive which led him to undertake the publication of his Funeral Monuments, viz., "To check the unsufferable injury, offered as well to the living as to the dead, by breaking down and almost utterly ruinating monuments with their epitaphs, and by erasing, tearing away, and pilfering brazen inscriptions, by which inhumane deformidable act, the honorable memory of many virtuous and noble persons deceased is extinguished, and the true understanding of divers families is so darkened, that the course of their inheritance is thereby partly interrupted."

Notes.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF CHAUCER, NO. VIII.

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,

—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,

or with Tyrwhitt:

Now, to Urry's reading, it may be objected that it makes the thing ascending to be Libra, and does not of necessity imply the moon's appearance above the horizon. But since the rising of the moon is a visible phenomenon, while that of Libra is theoretical, it must have been to the former Chaucer was alluding, as to something witnessed by the whole party as they

or otherwise this latter observation would have no meaning.

The objection to Tyrwhitt's reading is of a more technical nature—the moon, if in the middle of Libra, could not be above the horizon, in the neighbourhood of Canterbury, at four o'clock P. M., in the month of April. Tyrwhitt, it is true, would probably smooth away the difficulty by charging it as another inconsistency against his author; but I—and I hope by this time such readers of as are interested in the subject—have seen too many proofs of Chaucer's competency in matters of science, and of his commentator's incompetency, to feel disposed to concede to the latter such a convenient method of interpretation.

But there is a third objection common to both readings—that they do not satisfactorily account for the word "alway;" for although Tyrwhitt endeavours to explain it by continually, "was continually ascending," such a phrase is by no means intelligible when applied to a single observation.

For myself, I can say that this word "alway" was, from the first, the great difficulty with me—and the more I became convinced of the studied meaning with which Chaucer chose his other expressions, the less satisfied I was with this; and the more convinced I felt that the whole line had been corrupted.

In advocating the restoration of the reading which I have already suggested as the original meaning of Chaucer, I shall begin by establishing the probability of his having intended to mark the moon's place by associating her rising with that of a known fixed star—a method of noting phenomena frequently resorted to in ancient astronomy. For that purpose I shall point out another instance wherein Chaucer evidently intended an application of the same method for the purpose of indicating a particular position of the heavens; but first it must noted, that in alluding to the Zodiac, he always refers to the signs, never to the constellations—in fact, he does not appear to recognise the latter at all! Thus, in that palpable allusion to the precession of the equinoxes, in the Frankeleine's Tale—

—by the hed of Aries, Chaucer did not mean the os frontis of the Ram, whereon Alnath still shines conspicuously, but the equinoctial point, from which Alnath was shove by the extent of a whole sign.

This being premised, I return to the indication of a point in the ecliptic by the coincident rising of a star; and I contend that such was plainly Chaucer's intention in those lines of the Squire's Tale wherein King Cambuscan is described as rising from the feast:—

Which means that the sign Leo was then in the horizon—the precise degree being marked by the coincident rising of the star Aldryan.

Speght's explanation of "Aldryan," in which he has been copied by Urry and Tyrwhitt, is—"a star in the neck of the Lion." What particular star he may have meant by this, does not appear; nor am I at present within reach of probable sources wherein his authority, if he had any, might be searched for and examined; but I have learned to feel such confidence in Chaucer's significance of description, that I have no hesitation in assuming, until authority for a contrary inference shall be produced, that by the star "Aldryan" he meant REGULUS, not the neck, but the heart, of the Lion—

1st. Because it is the most remarkable star in the sign Leo.

2nd. Because it was,