! The reader will obferve a lacuna after verse 477, which may be made up out of thofe mfl. thus;

Thanne feyde yong Gamelyn

Unto the champioun,

Thou art fafte aboute

For to brynge me adoun.

And ver. 530,531, are thus read in mf. Ch.

t

There weren two gentellmen,

God yeve hem gode grace,
That comen to Gamelyn,
Were keperis of the place..

Ver. 540, 541;

Thanne feyde the champioun,
So browke I my fwere.

After ver. 555, mf. Ch. proceed thus;

And feyde have Gamelyn, thee ring and the ram

For thee befte wraftelere, that evere here cam,
And thus wan, &c.

which may be made very good metre with very little alteration.

Instead of befte, ver. 647, fhould be read chefte, i. e. quarrel, debate, &c. See Gower's Conf. Amant. 1. ii. fol. 49, b. edit. 1554

Ver. 706, may be read,

Offiftene plowis land the prowe. [Sie ver. 713.)

Inftead of bonde, ver. 365, H. 1, hath bound; but m Ch. hath it bandefaft. In ver. 972 both mff. want be, which is only an explanation of worthe. After rout, ver. 1192, fhould follow;"

Adam feyde Gamelyn,

What ben now thy redis?
Here comith the Shiregereve,
And wouldé have our hedis.
Adam feyde to Gamelyn
My rede is now this, &c.

།

Inftead of fay, ver. 1226, the mff. have fee; and ver. 1413, Both bufbande and wif; and ver. 1629, And with the juftice fpeke. And ver. 1692 and the following verfes may out of them be thus read;

Gamelyn fette hym adoun

In the Juftic'is fete,

And Adam and Ote his brother *

Settyn at his fete.

Whanne Gamelyn was fette

In the Juftic'is ftede,

Will ye herin of a bourde,
That Gamelyn [tho] dede?

He lete + fetre the Juftice, &c.

Thefe are fome of the most material amendments that may be made out of these miff. I doubt not but many more as confiderable may be made by an exact collation of all the mff. wherein this Tale is to be found.

There is very little to be added to what has been faid before concerning the other two pieces added in this edition. As they are printed from the fingle mf. of Mrs. Thynne the reader is to expect no more than an exact tranfcript from it, which Mr. Ainfworth affured me he had made. It may (perhaps with some shew of reafon) be fufpected that Chaucer was not the author of them, but a later writer, who may have taken the hint from what is suggested in ver. 796 of the Prologues, that the pilgrims were to tell Tales in their return homewards; butas to that the reader must be left to his own judgment. But fuppofing they were not writ by our Author, we are however obliged to Mr. Urry'sdiligence for finding out and publishing two ancient poems not unworthy our perufal; and they have as good a

H. 1, hath these verses thus ;

And Sir Ote his brother by hym, and Adam at his fete.
So it is in mf. Ch.

right to appear at the end of this edition as Lydgate's Story of Thebes had to be printed in former ones.

When the greatest part of the Tales were printed off there came to my hands another mf. of The Canterbury Tales which Mr. Urry had not feen. It belongs to Charles Cholmondeley Efq. of Vale-Royal in Chofhire, whofe name should be mentioned with particular respect for his readiness in communicating this mf. without any previous application, as foon as he understood where a new edition of Chaucer's Works was preparing. It is imperfect at the beginning and in most of the Tales, but thofe of the Frere and Sompnour are entirely loft. This mf. hath the Retractation at the end of The Parfon's Tale. Though this was the first copy of it which I had feen, yet I had an opportunity of collating it with other copies before it went to the prefs, and therefore the reader may expect to find it more complete and correct than any fingle mf. reprefents it. The valuablenefs of it will appear by the ufe which has been made of it in the gloffary. It was indeed defigned that fome of the different readings of it fhould have been fet down at the bottom of the page in thofe Tales which were not printed off when I received it, but my direction being misunderstood at the prefs fome of them were inferted in the text.

A mf. in octavo, partly written on vellum and partly on paper, containing the five books of Troilus and Crefeide, I found amongst books and papers left by Mr. Urry, but I could not perceive that he had made any ufe of it. It came not to my hands till a long time after that poem was printed off, but where upon collating I have found any material variations in the reading I have inferted them in the gloffaty. When I made this ufe of it I did not know to whom it belonged, and therefore quoted it in the manner mentioned a

bove, because it feemed to have once belenged to that learned antiquary Sir Henry Spelman, his name [Henvici Spelman] being written in a fair hand on the first leaf of it, and at the beginning of other tracts contained in that volume; but I have been fince informed that it belonged to the late Lord Vilcount Weymouth, from whom it is probable Mr. Urry borrowed it not long before his death, which might be the reafon that no notice is taken of it in that catalogue he left of the mff. which he had feen and perused.

There is another mi. of this poem in the Lord Harley's library, which has been occasionally confulted when any difficulty occured in revising the gloflary, and is there meant by H. 3.

It may be of ufe in this place to give the reader notice of another mf. in the Harleian library, [34, B. 18,1 which though it contains but two small pieces of our Author's, viz. How Pyte is dede, &c. and that beginning, The longe Nyghtis, &c. it may be worth an editor's while to collate for the many improvements and corrections that may be made from it, efpecially in the former poem, one of which is obferved under Herenus in the gloffary, wherein this book is designed by H. 4.

And it may be equally useful to a future editor to be advertised that Chaucer's Tale of Melibeus and his wife Prudence may receive confiderable improvements from a fragment of it at the end of a paper mf. [N° 140,] in the Arundelian collection belonging to the Royal Society, which is the only mf. there that contains any of our Author's works. This is mentioned here to prevent any future lofs of time in fearching amongst thofe mff. for the continuation of The Squier's Tale, which fome have pretended to have been complete in Arundel-House library *; nor is it likely the Phillips's Theatrum Poet. part ii. p. 51.

curious inquirer should be more fuccessful in his refearches elsewhere for the remainder of that Tale, which no doubt was left imperfect by the Author, as it is mentioned in fome mff. and in that mf. of Mr. Selden in the Bodl, library [Archiv, B. 30, 3360.] After the two verfes which we have of the third part of that Tale thefe eight verses follow;

But I here now wol maken a knotte,
To the tyme it come next to my lotte;
For here ben felawes behynde an hepe truly
That wolden talke full befily,

And have here sport as well as 1,

And the day paffith certaynly;

Therefore, Ofte, taketh now good hede
Who fhall nexte telle, and late him spede.

And certainly Spenfer was of opinion that Chaucer never finished it when he undertook to carry on that ftory, fo far at least as it made for his purpose, in his Fairy Queen, which gave occafion to others to fancy he wrote a continuation of it. That indeed was at tempted by one John Lanc in Q. Elizabeth's time; how well he fucceeded in his performance is left to the judgment of fuch as have leifure to perufe it in the Afhmolean Museum, No 6937.—I had likewise the affiftance of my friends in collating most of the old and all the valuable editions, &c.

See the paffage in the Teftimonies, vol. xiii.