Innumerable editions have since been published; and it may fairly be affirmed, that few books have been so much in favour with the reading public of every generation as this book, which the lapse of every generation has been rendering more unreadable. Apart from “The Romaunt of the Rose,” no really important poetical work of Chaucer’s is omitted from or unrepresented in the present edition. Of “The Legend of Good Women,” the Prologue only is given — but it is the most genuinely Chaucerian part of the poem. Of “The Court of Love,” three-fourths are here presented; of “The Assembly of Fowls,” “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale,” “The Flower and the Leaf,” all; of “Chaucer’s Dream,” one-fourth; of “The House of Fame,” two-thirds; and of the minor poems such a selection as may give an idea of Chaucer’s power in the “occasional” department of verse. Necessarily, no space whatever could be given to Chaucer’s prose works — his translation of Boethius’ Treatise on the Consolation of Philosophy; his Treatise on the Astrolabe, written for the use of his son Lewis; and his “Testament of Love,” composed in his later years, and reflecting the troubles that then beset the poet. If, after studying in a simplified form the salient works of England’s first great bard, the reader is tempted to regret that he was not introduced to a wider acquaintance with the author, the purpose of the Editor will have been more than attained. The plan of the volume does not demand an elaborate examination into the state of our language when Chaucer wrote, or the nice questions of grammatical and metrical structure which conspire with the obsolete orthography to make his poems a sealed book for the masses. The most important element in the proper reading of Chaucer’s verses — whether written in the decasyllabic or heroic metre, which he introduced into our literature, or in the octosyllabic measure used with such animated effect in “The House of Fame,” “Chaucer’s Dream,” &c. — is the sounding of the terminal “e” where it is now silent. That letter is still valid in French poetry; and Chaucer’s lines can be scanned only by reading them as we would read Racine’s or Molière’s. The terminal “e” played an important part in grammar; in many cases it was the sign of the infinitive — the “n” being dropped from the end; at other times it pointed the distinction between singular and plural, between adjective and adverb. The pages that follow, however, being prepared from the modern English point of view, necessarily no account is taken of those distinctions; and the now silent “e” has been retained in the text of Chaucer only when required by the modern spelling, or by the exigencies of metre.