Page:Tales from Chaucer.djvu/17

 true sense, to make it read something like prose; and even in some places, where his verse is given unaltered, as, hoping from its simple plainness, to cheat the young readers into a belief that they are reading prose, yet still, his language being transplanted from its own natural soil and wild poetic garden, it must want much of its native beauty.'

May you, in reading these pages, experience half the pleasure that the writing of them has afforded

Your Countryman and Friend,

THE AUTHOR.