"When that April with his shours sote." "And small foules maken melodie That slepen all night with open eie." "It befell that season on a day." "Ready to wend in my pilgrimage." "That toward Canterbury would ride-- The chambres and stables weren wide." "To tell you all the condition." "Full worthy was he in his lords warre." "Aboven all nations in Pruce." "For to tell you of his array." We suspect that there was all along a lingering tradition amongst the learned about the virtue of the Mute E's. Vestiges of the use occur in the poets of Elizabeth's time. Wallis, the celebrated grammarian, says, that "with our early poets it is found that that (final) E did or did not constitute an additional syllable, just as the stricture of the verse required it." Urry, whose edition of Chaucer was published, not long after his death, in 1721, knows for vocal the termination in ES, of genitive singular and of the plural--also the past tense and participle in ED, which, however, can hardly be thought much of, as it is a power over one mute E that we retain in use to this day. The final E, too, he marks for a syllable where he finds one wanted, but evidently without any grammatical reason. Urry was an unfortunate editor. Truly does Tyrwhitt say of him, that "his design of restoring the metre of Chaucer by a collation of MSS., was as laudable as his execution of it has certainly been unsuccessful." The natural causes of this ill success are thus severely and distinctly stated, "The strange license in which he appears to have indulged himself, of lengthening and shortening Chaucer's words according to his own fancy, and of even adding words of his own, without giving his readers the least notice, has made the text of Chaucer in his edition by far the worst that was ever published." One is not surprised when Tyrwhitt, the model of gentlemanly and scholarly editor, a very pattern of temperate, equitable, and merciful criticism, cannot refrain from closing his preface with this extinguishing censure of his wilful predecessor--"Mr Urry's edition should never be opened by any one for the purpose of reading Chaucer." Morell, a scholar, published in 1737 the Prologue and the Knight's Tale--and he, too, marked at need the Mute E's in his text, but by what rule Tyrwhitt does not intimate, nor do we now distinctly recollect. He courageously holds that the numbers of Chaucer "are always musical, whether they want or exceed the complement." But that cannot well be; for except in very peculiar cases--such, for example, as the happy line, "Gingling in the whistling wind full clear"--if the MS. have it so--a line of nine syllables only must be a _lame_ one--and their frequent recurrence would be the destruction of all music.