Crossword-Solution: MODERNISE 9 letters, 50 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 12

Presumptuous innovators have attempted to modernise Chaucer, and Spenser, and other authors, whose style was supposed to have grown obsolete.

But there has been not the slightest attempt to “modernise” Chaucer, in the wider meaning of the phrase; to replace his words by words which he did not use; or, following the example of some operators, to translate him into English of the modern spirit as well as the modern forms.

There would be a tendency to elaborate, to adorn in the newest fashion, hence to modernise, and it is not only conceivable but most probable that the original form should be farther departed from than in the case of much else in the epic.

Butler made this note in the same year; he revised the note in 1897 but, owing to changes in the gallery and in the attributions, I have found it necessary to modernise his descriptions of the other pictures with gold thread work so as to make them agree with the descriptions now (1912) on the pictures themselves.

But as, after leaving my hotel the afternoon I arrived, I wandered for a long time at hazard through the tortuous by-ways of the city, I said to myself, not without an accent of private triumph, that here at last was something it would be almost impossible to modernise.