To one standing on the threshold of the twentieth century and looking back over the route traversed by students of Chaucer in the century that was just closing it must have seemed that they had come a long way. The main facts of the poet's life had been established and were buttressed by an impressive volume of Life Records. For more than thirty years Furnivall, that great pioneer and crusader for Early English studies, had poured forth a steady stream of discoveries, notes, and observations, and in his Temporary Preface and Trial-Forewards had grappled with fundamental problems, many of which he was the first to raise. The Chaucer Society, which he organized, had published more than a hundred issues devoted to unprinted manuscripts, sources and analogues, essays, studies, and aids of one kind or another. Ten Brink, in his Chaucer Studien of 1870, had exemplified a method and approach to the study of Chaucer's poetry leading to results which, so far as they went, seemed definitive in their day. Child and Manly and Kittredge had put the study of Chaucer's language and meter on a solid foundation, on a part of which ten Brink had erected a more unified structure in his Chaucers Sprache und Verskunst (1884). And finally, as a kind of culmination to a half-century of unprecedented scholarly activity came the monumental Oxford edition of the poet by Skeat in six volumes and a supplement. The Student's edition of this work and the Globe edition of Pollard and his collaborators had provided very acceptable texts for the general reader and the classroom. It can justly be said that Chaucer studies had reached scholarly maturity by 1900.