The plan of the 'British Poets' originally contemplated an edition of Chaucer, which Mr Child was to prepare. Becoming convinced, however, that the time was not ripe for such a work, he abandoned this project, and to the end of his life he never found time to resume it. Thomas Wright's print of the Canterbury Tales[4] from the Harleian MS. 7334 had, however, put into his hands a reasonably faithful reproduction of an old text, and he turned his attention to a minute study of Chaucer's language. The outcome was the publication, in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for 1863, of the great treatise to which Mr Child gave the modest title of Observations on the Language of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It is difficult, at the present day, to imagine the state of Chaucer philology at the moment when this paper appeared. Scarcely anything, we may say, was known of Chaucer's grammar and metre in a sure and scientific way. Indeed, the difficulties to be solved had not even been clearly formulated. Further, the accessible mass of evidence on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English was, in comparison with the stores now at the easy command of every tyro, almost insignificant. Yet, in this brief treatise, Mr Child not only defined the problems, but provided for most of them a solution which the researches of younger scholars have only served to substantiate. He also gave a perfect model of the method proper to such inquiries--a method simple, laborious, and exact. The Observations were subsequently rearranged and condensed, with Professor Child's permission, by Mr A. J. Ellis for his work On Early English Pronunciation; but only those who have studied them in their original form can appreciate their merit fully. "It ought never to be forgotten," writes Professor Skeat, "that the only full and almost complete solution of the question of the right scansion of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is due to what Mr Ellis rightly terms 'the wonderful industry, acuteness, and accuracy of Professor Child.'" Had he produced nothing else, this work, with its pendant, the Observations on Gower,[5] would have assured him a high place among those very few scholars who have permanently settled important problems of linguistic science. Mr Child's crowning work, however, was the edition of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which the reader now has before him. The history of this is the history of more than half a lifetime.