And, since there is so great diversity In English, and in writing of our tongue, I pray to God that none may miswrite thee Nor thee mismetre, for default of tongue, And wheresoe'er thou mayst be read or sung, That thou be understood, God I beseech. But in his versification he likewise adopted certain other practices which had no such origin or reason as those already referred to. Among them were the addition, at the end of a line of five accents, of an unaccented syllable; and the substitution, for the first foot of a line either of four or of five accents, of a single syllable. These deviations from a stricter system of versification he doubtless permitted to himself, partly for the sake of variety, and partly for that of convenience; but neither of them is peculiar to himself, or of supreme importance for the effect of his verse. In fact, he seems to allow as much in a passage of his "House of Fame," a poem written, it should, however, be observed, in an easy-going form of verse (the line of four accents) which in his later period Chaucer seems with this exception to have invariably discarded. He here beseeches Apollo to make his rhyme somewhat agreeable, Though some verse fail in a syllable. But another of his usages--the misunderstanding of which has more than anything else caused his art as a writer of verse to be misjudged--seems to have been due to a very different cause. To understand the real nature of the usage in question it is only necessary to seize the principle of Chaucer's rhythm. Of this principle it was well said many years ago by a most competent authority--Mr. R. Horne--that, it is "inseparable from a full or fair exercise of the genius of our language in versification." For though this usage in its full freedom was gradually again lost to our poetry for a time, yet it was in a large measure recovered by Shakspere and the later dramatists of our great age, and has since been never altogether abandoned again--not even by the correct writers of the Augustan period--till by the favourites of our own times it is resorted to with a perhaps excessive liberality. It consists simply in SLURRING over certain final syllables--not eliding them or contracting them with the syllables following upon them, but passing over them lightly, so that, without being inaudible, they may at the same time not interfere with the rhythm or beat of the verse. This usage, by adding to the variety, incontestably adds to the flexibility and beauty of Chaucer's versification.)