Produced by Louise Hope, Robert Cicconetti and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) [Transcriber’s Note: This e-text includes characters that require UTF-8 (Unicode) file encoding, including: ſ (long “s”) Ȝȝ (yogh) m̅ (m with over-line; the equivalent “n” form is shown as ñ with tilde for better font support) ǽ (æ with accent, only in the Glossary) There are also a few letters with macron (“long” mark). If any of these characters do not display properly--in particular, if the diacritic does not appear directly above the letter--or if the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, make sure your text reader’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change the default font. As a last resort, use the Latin-1 version of the file instead. Unlike most EETS productions, this book was printed with long “s” (ſ). The editor’s Introduction says: We find, in the MS., both the long and the twisted _s_ (ſ and s). These have been noted down as they occur, though I do not observe any law for their use. The letter “ß” has been adopted as closely resembling a symbol in the MS., which apparently has the force of double _s_, and is not unlike the “_sz_” used in modern German hand-writing. An italic form of þ (thorn) was apparently not available to the printer. In the modern parts of this e-text, the letter has been italicized when context seems to warrant it. In the poem, all italics--representing expanded contractions or abbreviations--are shown with {braces} as “se{n}t” or “{and}”. Other italics are shown conventionally with _lines_. To reduce visual clutter, italics in folio numbers (“1 _b_”) are unmarked. The change in labeling from “21, 21b” to “22a, 22b” appears to be accidental. Large initial letters in the primary texts are marked with leading double ++ as “++Messire”, “++Maist{er}”. The random variation between capital and lower-case letters after an initial is as in the original. Superscripts are shown with ^ alone. Unless otherwise noted, the superscripting continues to the end of the word. In the Glossary, ȝ (yogh) is alphabetized as z. In the printed book, some line numbers were moved or omitted for reasons of space; they have been silently regularized. Sidenotes giving folio numbers are shown as printed. Other sidenotes have been moved to the nearest convenient sentence break or major punctuation. Where practical, footnotes are grouped together, preferably before headnotes, stanza breaks (random) or decorative capitals. Headnotes have been moved to agree with the text, and will generally not coincide with printed page breaks.