Footnotes: The original book has an average of 30 footnotes per page. These were of three types: (A) Glosses or explanations of obsolete words and phrases. These have been treated as follows: 1. In the poems, they have been moved up into the right-hand margin. Some of them have been shortened or paraphrased in order to fit. Explanations of single words have a single asterisk at the end of the word and at the beginning of the explanation*. *like this If two words in the same line have explanations the first* has one and the second**, two. *like this **and this Explanations of phrases have an asterisk at the start and end *of the phrase* and of the explanation *like this* Sometimes these glosses wrap onto the next line, still in the right margin. If you read this e-text using a monospaced font (like Courier in a word processor such as MS Word, or the default font in most text editors) then the marginal notes are right-justified. 2. In the prose tales, they have been imbedded into the text in square brackets after the word or phrase they refer to [like this]. (B) Etymological explanations of these words. These are indicted by a number in angle brackets in the marginal gloss.* The note will be found at the *like this <1> end of the poem or section. (C) Longer notes commenting on or explaining the text. These are indicated in the text by numbers in angle brackets thus: <1>. The note will be found at the end of the poem or section. Latin: Despite his declared aim of editing the tales “for popular perusal”, Purves has left nearly all Latin quotations untranslated. I have translated them as well as I could — any errors are my fault, not his. PREFACE. THE object of this volume is to place before the general reader our two early poetic masterpieces — The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queen; to do so in a way that will render their “popular perusal” easy in a time of little leisure and unbounded temptations to intellectual languor; and, on the same conditions, to present a liberal and fairly representative selection from the less important and familiar poems of Chaucer and Spenser. There is, it may be said at the outset, peculiar advantage and propriety in placing the two poets side by side in the manner now attempted for the first time. Although two centuries divide them, yet Spenser is the direct and really the immediate successor to the poetical inheritance of Chaucer. Those two hundred years, eventful as they were, produced no poet at all worthy to take up the mantle that fell from Chaucer’s shoulders; and Spenser does not need his affected archaisms, nor his frequent and reverent appeals to “Dan Geffrey,” to vindicate for himself a place very close to his great predecessor in the literary history of England. If Chaucer is the “Well of English undefiled,” Spenser is the broad and stately river that yet holds the tenure of its very life from the fountain far away in other and ruder scenes.