A large number of stanzas readily lend themselves to similar treatment; and this is quite enough to dissociate the poem from Chaucer. The great difficulty about modernising Chaucer is, as every one knows, his use of the final _-e_ as a distinct syllable; but we may search a whole page of La Belle Dame without finding anything of the kind. When Sir Richard's words have an extra syllable, it is due to the suffix _-es_ or the suffix _-ed_; and even these are not remarkably numerous; we do not arrive at _cloth-ës_, a plural in _-es_, before l. 22; and, in the course of the first four stanzas, all the words in _-ed_ are _awak-ed_, _nak-ed_, _vex-ed_, _tourn-ed_, and _bold-ed_, none of which would be surprising to a student of Elizabethan poetry. That there was something of a Northern element in Sir Richard's language appears from the rime of _long-es_ with _song-es_, in ll. 53-55; where _longes_ is the third person singular of the present tense; but modern English has _belongs_, with the same suffix! Again, he constantly uses the Northern possessive pronoun _their_; but modern English does the same! § 46. Another remarkable point about the poem is the perfect smoothness and regularity of the metre in a large number of lines, even as judged by a modern standard. The first line--'Half in a dream, not fully well awaked'--might, from a metrical point of view, have been written yesterday. It is a pity that the poem is somewhat dull, owing to its needless prolixity; but this is not a little due to Alan Chartier. Sir Richard has only eight stanzas of his own, four at the beginning, and four at the end; and it is remarkable that these are in the seven-line stanza, while the rest of the stanzas have eight lines, like their French original, of which I here give the first stanza, from the Paris edition of 1617, p. 502. (See l. 29 of the English version.) 'N'agueres cheuauchant pensoye, Comme homme triste et douloreux, Au dueil où il faut que ie soye Le plus dolant des amoureux; Puisque par son dart rigoureux La mort me tolli ma Maistresse, Et me laissa seul langoureux En la conduicte de tristesse.' I have cited in the Notes a few passages of the original text which help to explain the translation.