The same coincidence does not fail wholly even with Chaucer, of whom an edition, little altered from Speght’s, appeared in 1687, while the very ill-inspired but still intentionally critical attempt of Urry came out in 1721, Dryden’s wonderful modernisings again coming between. But Chaucer was to wait for Tyrwhitt, more than fifty years later (1775) before he met any full scholarly recognition, and this was natural enough. There had been no real change in English prosody since Spenser, any more than since Shakespeare: and the archaism of the former was after all an archaism not less deliberate, though much better guided by genius, than that of any of his eighteenth-century imitators. To the appreciation of Chaucer’s prosody one simple but, till turned, almost insuperable obstacle existed in the valued final _e_, while his language, his subjects, and his thought were separated from modern readers by the great gulf of the Renaissance,—a gulf indeed not difficult to bridge after a fashion, but then unbridged. [Sidenote: _Elizabethan minors._] Invaluable as the study of Shakespeare was in itself, its value was not limited to this direct gain. Partly to illustrate him and partly from a natural extension, his fellow-dramatists were resorted to,—indeed Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher had never lost hold of the acting stage. A few of the greatest, Marlowe especially, were somewhat long in coming to their own; but with others it was different, and the publication of Dodsley’s _Old Plays_, at so early a date as 1744, shows with what force the tide was setting in this direction. Reference was made in the last volume to the very remarkable _Muses’ Library_ which Oldys began even earlier, though he did not find encouragement enough to go on with it,[332] and the more famous adventure of the _Reliques_ was followed up in the latter part of the century by divers explorations of the treasures of the past, notably that of the short-lived Headley.[335] [Sidenote: _Middle and Old English._] Nay, about the close of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth it looked as if early Middle English and Anglo-Saxon themselves might come in for a share of attention, as a result of the labours of such men as Hearne and Hickes. But the Jacobite antiquary was interested mainly in the historical side of literature, and Hickes, Wanley, and the rest were a little before their time, though that time itself was sure to come. And before it came the all but certain forgeries of Macpherson, the certain forgeries of Chatterton, the sham ballads with which, after Percy’s example, Evans and others loaded their productions of the true, all worked (bad as some of the latter might be) for good in the direction of exciting and whetting the literary appetite for things not according to the Gospel of Neo-Classicism. [Sidenote: _Influence of English abroad._]