The soveraigne of seas he blames in vaine,
    That, once sea-beate, will to sea againe: 
    So loytring live you little heardgroomes,
    Keeping you beastes in the budded broomes: 
    And, when the shining sunne laugheth once,
    You deemen the Spring is come attonce;
    Tho gynne you, fond flyes! the cold to scorne,
    And, crowing in pypes made of greene corn,
    You thinken to be Lords of the yeare;
    But eft, when ye count you freed from feare,
    Cornes the breme Winter with chamfred browes,
    Full of wrinckles and frostie furrowes,
    Drerily shooting his stormy darte,
    Which cruddles the blood and pricks the harte: 
    Then is your carelesse corage accoied,
    Your careful heards with cold bene annoied: 
    Then paye you the price of your surquedrie,
    With weeping, and wailing, and misery.[100]

The syllabic value of the final e, already weakening in the London of Chaucer’s later days, was more or less of an archaism even with his most immediate followers, none of whom use it with his unvarying correctness, and it soon became literally a dead letter.  The change was a momentous one for English prosody, and none of the fifteenth-century writers possessed sufficient poetic genius to adapt their verse to the altered conditions of the language.  They lived from hand to mouth, as it were, without arriving at any systematic tradition.  Thus it was that at the beginning of the sixteenth century Hawes could write such verse as: 

    Of dame Astronomy I dyd take my lycence
    For to travayle to the toure of Chyvalry;
    For al my minde, wyth percyng influence,
    Was sette upon the most fayre lady
    La Bell Pucell, so muche ententyfly,
    That every daye I dyd thinke fyftene,
    Tyl I agayne had her swete person sene.[101]

It is this prosody, dependent usually upon a strong caesural pause to differentiate it from prose, which may account for the harshness of some of Wyatt’s verse, and which rendered possible the barbarous metre of Barclay.  It was obviously impossible for a poet with an ear like Spenser to accept such a metrical scheme as this; but his own study of Chaucer produced a somewhat strange result.  The one point which the late Chaucerians preserved of their master’s metric was the five-stress character of his decasyllabic line; but in Spenser’s day all memory of the syllabic e had long since vanished, and the only rhythm to be extracted from Chaucer’s verse was of a four-stress type.  Professor Herford quotes a passage from the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales as it appears in Thynne’s second edition (1542), which Spenser would inevitably have read as follows: 

    When zephirus eke wyth hys sote breth
    Enspyred hath every holte and heth,
    The tendre croppes, and the yong sonne
    Hath in the Ram halfe hys course yronne,
    And smale foules maken melodye
    That slepen al nyght with open eye, &c.