Excerpt from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: The Prologue

The lines on which this edition of Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is compiled have been determined by a happy conjunction of my own inclination and an external cause. After it had been begun, Dr. Liddell, one of my collaborators in the 'Globe' Chaucer, edited also for Messrs. Macmillan, though primarily for the Macmillan Company of New York, an edition of the Prologue and the Tales of the Knight and the Nun's Priest. When his book was announced, a dislike of even seeming to compete with a friend who had given me such valuable help in a previous undertaking made me wish to abandon my own task. But on studying Dr. Liddell's edition I found that there was no possibility of any work of mine coming into collision with it, and that its existence made my own task easier. While Dr. Liddell has given a useful minimum of illustrative notes, he has put his main strength into an exposition of Chaucer's practice as regards phonology, grammar, and syntax, which seems to me by far the ablest dissertation on the subject yet published. To this, therefore, I can now happily refer all students who desire advanced instruction in the linguistic aspect of Chaucer's poetry. My own interest in Chaucer is not linguistic, but literary and historical.

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