Chaucerians preserved of their master's metric was the five-stress
character of his decasyllabic line; but in Spenser's day all memory of the
syllabic _e_ had long since vanished, and the only rhythm to be extracted
from Chaucer's verse was of a four-stress type. Professor Herford quotes a
passage from the Prologue of the _Canterbury Tales_ as it appears in
Thynne's second edition (1542), which Spenser would inevitably have read
as follows:

When zéphirus éke wyth hýs sote bréth
Enspýred hath évery hólte and héth,
The téndre cróppes, and the yóng sónne
Háth in the Rám halfe hys cóurse yrónne,
And smále foules máken mélodýe
That slépen al nýght with ópen éye, &c.

This certainly bears on the face of it a close resemblance to Spenser's
measure. There are, moreover, occasional difficulties in this method of
scansion, some lines refusing to accommodate themselves to the Procrustean
methods of sixteenth-century editors, and exactly similar anomalies are to
be found in Spenser. Such, for instance, are the lines in the May eclogue:

Tho opened he the dore, and in came
The false Foxe, as he were starke lame.

Now these lines may be written in strict Chaucerian English thus:

Tho openëd he the dore, and innë came
The falsë fox, as he were starkë lamë,

and they at once become perfectly metrical. Under these circumstances