acquaintance with the author, the purpose of the Editor will
have been more than attained.

The plan of the volume does not demand an elaborate
examination into the state of our language when Chaucer wrote,
or the nice questions of grammatical and metrical structure
which conspire with the obsolete orthography to make his
poems a sealed book for the masses. The most important
element in the proper reading of Chaucer's verses -- whether
written in the decasyllabic or heroic metre, which he introduced
into our literature, or in the octosyllabic measure used with such
animated effect in "The House of Fame," "Chaucer's Dream,"
&c. -- is the sounding of the terminal "e" where it is now silent.
That letter is still valid in French poetry; and Chaucer's lines can
be scanned only by reading them as we would read Racine's or
Moliere's. The terminal "e" played an important part in
grammar; in many cases it was the sign of the infinitive -- the
"n" being dropped from the end; at other times it pointed the
distinction between singular and plural, between adjective and
adverb. The pages that follow, however, being prepared from
the modern English point of view, necessarily no account is
taken of those distinctions; and the now silent "e" has been
retained in the text of Chaucer only when required by the
modern spelling, or by the exigencies of metre.

Before a word beginning with a vowel, or with the letter "h,"
the final "e" was almost without exception mute; and in such
cases, in the plural forms and infinitives of verbs, the terminal
"n" is generally retained for the sake of euphony. No reader
who is acquainted with the French language will find it hard to