But it is the verses casually jotted down in unrelated books that bring home most vividly the slenderness of the thread of transmission. A student has committed _Now Springs the Spray_ to solitary imprisonment between the joyless leaves of an old law book. The song of the Irish Dancer and _The Maid of the Moor_ were scribbled, with some others from a minstrel's stock, on the fly-leaf of a manuscript now in the Bodleian. On a blank page of another a prudent man (who used vile ink, long since faded) has written the verses that banish rats, much as a modern householder might treasure up some annihilating prescription. To these waifs the chance of survival did not come twice, and to a number incalculable it never came. It has been the purpose of this digression to bring the extant literature into perspective: not to raise useless regrets for what is lost, since we can learn only from what remains; nor to contest the value of statistics of surviving copies as a proof of circulation, provided the works compared are similar in length and kind, and are represented in enough manuscripts to make figures significant; nor yet to deny that didactic verse bulks large in the output of the fourteenth century: it could not be otherwise in an anxious age, when the scarcity of remains gives everything written in English a place in literary history, and when for almost everything verse was preferred to prose. It seemed better to redress the balance of chance by stealing from the end of the thirteenth century a few fragments that following generations would not forget, than to lend colour to the suggestion that ninety-nine of the men of Chaucer's century enjoyed _The Prick of Conscience_ for every one that caught up the refrain of _Now Springs the Spray_, or danced through _The Maid of the Moor_, or sang the praises of Alison. V However much a maker of excerpts may stretch his commission to give variety, it is in vain if the reader will not do his part; for it lies with him to find interest. Really no effective attack can be made on a crust of such diversified hardness until the reader looks at his text as a means of winning back something of the life of the past, and feels a pleasure in the battle against vagueness. The first step is to find out the verbal meaning. Strange words, that force themselves on the attention and are easily found in dictionaries and glossaries, try a careful reader less than groups of common words—such lines as _Þe fairest leuedi, for þe nones, Þat miȝt gon on bodi and bones_ II 53-4