"When he (Chaucer) tells us that 'the shoures of April had _perced to the rote_ the drought of March' (ver. 1, 2.), we must suppose, in order to allow due time for such an operation, that April was far advanced; while, on the other hand, the place of the sun, 'having just run _half his course in the Ram_' (ver. 7, 8.), restrains us to some day in the very latter end of March. This difficulty may, and, I think, should, be removed by reading in ver. 8. the BULL, instead of the RAM. All the parts of the description will then be consistent with themselves, and with another passage (ver. 4425.), where, in the best MSS., the _eighte and twenty_ day of April is named as the day of the journey to Canterbury."--_Introductory Discourse._ Accordingly, Mr. Tyrwhitt did not hesitate to adopt in his text the twenty-eighth of April as the true date, without stopping to examine whether that day would, or would not, be consistent with the subsequent phenomena related by Chaucer. Notwithstanding Tyrwhitt's assertion of a difficulty only removable by changing the Ram into the Bull, there are no less than two ways of understanding the seventh and eighth lines of the prologue so as to be perfectly in accordance with the rest of the description. One of these would be to suppose the sign Aries divided into two portions (not necessarily _equal_ in the phraseology of the time), one of which would appertain to March, anal the other to April--and that Chaucer, by the "halfe cours yronne," meant the _last_, or _the April_, half of the sign Aries. But I think a more probable supposition still would be to imagine the month of April, of which Chaucer was speaking, to be divided into two "halfe cours," in one of which the sun would be in Aries, and in the other in Taurus; and that when Chaucer says that "the yonge Sonne had in the Ram his halfe cours yronne," he meant that the _Aries half of the month of April_ had been run through, thereby indicating _in general terms_ some time approaching to the middle of April. Both methods of explaining the phrase lead eventually to the same result, which is also identical with the interpretation of Chaucer's own contemporaries, as appears in its imitation by Lydgate in the opening of his "Story of Thebes:" "Whan bright Phebus passed was the Ram, Midde of Aprill, and into the Bull came." And it is by no means the least remarkable instance of want of perception in Tyrwhitt, that he actually cites these two lines of Lydgate's _as corroborative of his own interpretation_, which places the sun _in the middle of Taurus_. I enter into this explanation, not that I think it necessary to examine too curiously into the consistency of an expression which evidently was intended only in a general sense, but that the groundlessness of Tyrwhitt's alleged necessity for the alteration of "the Ram" into "the Bull" might more clearly appear.