Note 38 — XIII. Later Middle English Period Potentially Metrical Lines in Langland (see Book II).

Spenser here takes (as he sometimes continued to do even in F. Q.) the liberty of shifting the rhyming syllable. There is no doubt that this is not a good liberty. But in struggling out of the fifteenth-century slough Wyatt was constantly driven to it, and it was not till the seventeenth that poets recognised the fact that the easement was more of a disfigurement than it was worth.