e of
antiquity--the orthography. That last may seem a small matter; but it is
not.

There are three ways in which literary craftsmen have attempted to fill
up, or bridge over, the gulf of time, and bring the poet of Edward III.
and Richard II. near to modern readers.

Dryden and Pope are the representatives, as they are the masters, of the
first method; for the others who have trodden in their footsteps are
hardly to be named or thought of. Dryden and Pope hold, in their own
school of modernizing, this undoubted distinction, that under their
treatment, that which was poetry remains poetry. Their followers have
written, for the most part, intelligible English, but never poetry. They
have told the story, and not that always; but they have distilled
lethargy on the tongue of the narrator.--This first method the most
boldly departs from the type. It was probably the only way that the
culture of Dryden's and Pope's time admitted of. We have since gradually
returned, more and more, upon our own antiquity, as all the nations of
Europe have upon theirs. Then civilization seemed to herself to escape
forwards out of barbarism. Now she finds herself safe; and she ventures
to seek light for her mature years in the recollections of her own
childhood.

But now, the altered spirit of the age has produced a new manner of
modernization. The problem has been put thus. To retain of Chaucer
whatever in him is our language, or is most nearly our language--only
making good, always, the measure; and for expression, which time has
left out of our speech, to substitute such as is in use. And several
followers of the muses, as we have seen, have lately tried their hand at
this kind of conversion.

It is hard to judge both the system and the specimens. For if the
specimens be thought to have succeeded, the system may, upon them, be
favourably judged; but if the specimens have failed, the system must not
upon them be unfavourably judged, but must in candour be looked upon as
possibly carrying in itself means and powers that have not yet been
unfolded. But unhappily a difficulty occurs which would not have
occurred with a writer in prose--the law of the verse is imperious. Ten
syllables must be kept, and rhyme must be kept; and in the experiment it
results, generally, that whilst the rehabiting of Chaucer is undertaken
under a necessity which lies wholly in the obscurity of his dialect--the
proposed ground or motive of modernization--far the g