XXI. _Against Women Unconstaunt_ (21).--Ct. F. Ha.; ed. 1561. XXII. _An Amorous Complaint_ (91).--Harl. F. B. XXIII. _Balade of Complaint_ (21).--Ad. § 15. REMARKS ON SOME OF THE MSS. Some of these MSS. deserve a few special remarks. Shirley's MSS. are--A. Ad. H. Harl. Sh. Sion, _and_ T. MSS. in Scottish spelling are--Ar. Bannatyne. Kk.; L. shews Northern tendencies. MSS. AT OXFORD. F. (Fairfax 16) is a valuable MS.; not only does it contain as many as sixteen of these Minor Poems, but it is a fairly written MS. of the fifteenth century. The spelling does not very materially differ from that of such an excellent MS. as the Ellesmere MS. of the Canterbury Tales, excepting in the fact that a great number of final _e_'s are added in wrong places, and are dropped where they are required. This is a matter that can be to a large extent rectified, and I have endeavoured to do so, taking it in many instances as the standard text. Next to this misuse of final _e_'s, which is merely due to the fact that it was written out at a time when the true use of them was already lost, its most remarkable characteristic is the scribe's excessive love of the letter _y_ in place of _i_; he writes _hyt ys_ instead of _hit is_, and the like. In a great number of instances I have restored _i_, where the vowel is short. When the text of the Fairfax MS. is thus restored, it is by no means a bad one. It also contains fair copies of many poems by Hoccleve and Lydgate, such as the former's _Letter of Cupide_[242], and the latter's _Complaint of the Black Knight_, _Temple of Glass_, and _Balade against Women's Doubleness_, being the very piece which is introduced into Stowe's edition, and is numbered 45 above (see p. 33). We are also enabled, by comparing this MS. with MS. Harl. 7578, to solve another riddle, viz. why it is that Chaucer's Proverbs, as printed in Morris's and Bell's editions, are followed by two 7-line stanzas which have nothing whatever to do with them. In MS. Harl. 7578 these two stanzas immediately _follow_, and MS. F. immediately _precede_ Chaucer's Proverbs, and therefore were near enough to them to give an excuse for throwing them in together. However, both these stanzas are by Lydgate, and are mere fragments[243]. The former of them, beginning 'The worlde so wide, thaire so remuable,' really belongs to a poem of 18 stanzas, printed in Halliwell's edition of Lydgate's Minor Poems (Percy Soc.), p. 193. The latter of them, beginning 'The more I goo, the ferther I am behinde,' belongs to a poem of 11 stanzas, printed in the same, p. 74. Perhaps this will serve as a hint to future editors of Chaucer, from whose works it is high time to exclude poems _known_ to be by some other hand.