“Therefore no woman of clerkës is [is of clerkës] praised”
“His felaw lo, here he stont [stont he] hool on live.”
“He that covèteth is a porë wight
For he wold have that is not in his might;
But he that nought hath ne coveteth nought to have.”
Here the “but” of the third verse belongs at the head of the first, and
we get rid of the anomaly of “coveteth” differently accented within two
lines. Nearly all the seemingly unmetrical verses may be righted in this
way. I find a good example of this in the last stanza of “Troilus and
Creseide.” As it stands, we read,--
“Thou one, two, and three, eterne on live
That raignast aie in three, two and one.”
It is plain that we should read “one _and_ two” in the first verse, and
“three _and_ two” in the second. Remembering, then, that Chaucer was
here translating Dante, I turned (after making the correction) to the
original, and found as I expected
“Quell’ uno _e_ due e tre che sempre vive
E regna sempre in tre _e_ due ed uno.” (Par. xiv. 28, 29.)