And what more natural? The Midland dialect was the dialect of his English teachers. The poems of Chaucer he probably had by heart. Mr. Brown’s object in all this is to relegate the _Kingis Quair_ to that group of poems which are represented by the _Romaunt of the Rose_, _The Court of Love_, and _Lancelot of the Lak_, which appeared late in the fifteenth century, and in which all these peculiarities are very pronounced. Into philological details we have not space to enter, but this we will say. We will admit that _ane_ before a consonant, the past participle in _yt_ or _it_, the pronouns _thaire_ and _thame_, the plural form _quhilkis_, the employment of the verb _to do_ in the emphatic conjugation and the like, are peculiarities which belong to a period not earlier than about 1440, and that all these peculiarities are to be found in the poem. But, we contend that these are just as likely to be due to the transcriber as they are to the author. Nothing was so common with copyists as to import into their texts the peculiarities of their own dialects, indeed it was habitual with them. Thus Hampole’s _Pricke of Conscience_ was greatly altered by southern scribes. Thus, in the Bannatyne MS., Chaucer’s minor poems were similarly altered by northern scribes. It is, in truth, the very height of rashness to dispute the genuineness of an original, in consequence of the presence of peculiarities which might quite well have been imported into it by a copyist. The resemblances between this poem and the _Court of Love_ are, we admit, not likely to have been mere coincidences, and we are quite ready to admit that the _Court of Love_ in the form in which we have it now, must be assigned to a much later date, more than a century later, than the date (1423) assigned to the _Kingis Quair_. But this is certain--that many, and very many, of the resemblances between the two poems are to be attributed to the fact that the writers were saturated with the influence of Chaucer, and delighted in imitating and recalling his poetry. If, again, it be assumed that one poem was the exemplar of the other, this is indisputable, that the _Court of Love_ was modelled on the _Kingis Quair_, and not the _Kingis Quair_ on the _Court of Love_. For, setting aside peculiarities which may be assigned to transcribers, there can be little doubt that the _Court of Love_ belongs to the sixteenth century at the very earliest, while Mr. Brown himself admits that the MS. of the _Kingis Quair_ may be approximately fixed at 1488.