strongest, he seized it with readiness. Some degree of seriousness there probably is, for Chaucer’s sound and healthy view of life instinctively rejected the rather morbid horrors to which he refers; but it may easily be suspected that he was chiefly amused by the opportunity of publicly lecturing the moralist, who perhaps had privately remonstrated with himK. As to the notion that Chaucer had been seriously offended by the occasional and very trifling resemblances of phrase in Gower’s tale of Constance with his own version of the same original, it is hardly worth discussion.

There is of course the possibility that Gower may have taken it more seriously than it was meant, and though he was not quite so devoid of a sense of humour as it has been the fashion to supposeL, yet he may well have failed to enjoy a public attack, however humorous, upon two of his tales. It must be observed, however, that if we suppose the passage in question to have been the cause of the excision of Gower’s lines about Chaucer, we must assume that the publication of it took place precisely within this period of a few months which elapsed between the first and the second versions of Gower’s epilogue.

Before further considering the question as to what was actually our author’s motive in omitting the tribute to his brother poet, we should do well to observe that this tribute was apparently allowed to stand in some copies of the rewritten epilogue. There is one good manuscript, that in the possession of Lord Middleton,[Pg xxviii] in which the verses about Chaucer not only stand in combination with the new form of epilogue, but in a text which has also the revised preface, dated two years laterM. Hence it seems possible that the exclusion of the Chaucer verses was rather accidental than deliberate, and from this and other considerations an explanation may be derived which will probably seem too trivial, but nevertheless is perhaps the true one. We know from the Fairfax MS. of the Confessio Amantis and from several original copies of the Vox Clamantis that the author’s method of rewriting his text was usually to erase a certain portion, sometimes a whole column or page, and substitute a similar number of lines of other matter. It will be observed here that for the thirty lines 2941*-2970*, including the reference to Chaucer, are substituted thirty lines from which that reference is excluded. After this come four Latin lines replacing an equal number in the original recension, and then follow fifteen lines, 2971-2985, which are the same except a single line in the two editions. It may be that the author, wishing to mention the departure of the Confessor and the thoughts which he had upon 

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