[DOWNLOAD] "Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851" by Various Authors # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851
- Author : Various Authors
- Release Date : January 01, 2012
- Genre: Study Aids,Books,Reference,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 76 KB
Description
This is a notes book. Unless Chaucer had intended to mark with particular exactness the day of the journey to Canterbury, he would not have taken such unusual precautions to protect his text from ignorant or careless transcribers. We find him not only recording the altitudes of the sun, at different hours, in words; but also corroborating those words by associating them with physical facts incapable of being perverted or misunderstood. Had Chaucer done this in one instance only, we might imagine that it was but another of those occasions, so frequently seized upon by him, for the display of a little scientific knowledge; but when he repeats the very same precautionary expedient again, in the afternoon of the same day, we begin to perceive that he must have had some fixed purpose; because, as I shall presently show, it is the repetition alone that renders the record imperishable. But whether Chaucer really devised this method for the express purpose of preserving his text, or not, it has at least had that effect, —for while there are scarcely two MSS. extant which agree in the verbal record of the day and hours, the physical circumstances remain, and afford at all times independent data for the recovery or correction of the true reading.