idea that punctuation in 1623 and earlier was for the ear and 
not for the eye.

     Until Addison, as we shall see, the author felt little 
pressure to maintain a single attitude to his subject or a 
consistent tone to the reader. In short, prose remained oral 
rather than visual for centuries after printing. Instead of 
homogeneity there was heterogeneity of tone and attitude, so 
that the author felt able to shift these in mid-sentence at any 
time, just as in poetry. (38) It was disturbing to scholars to 
discover in recent years that Chaucer’s personal pronoun or his 
“poetic self” as narrator was not a consistent persona . The “I” 
of medieval narrative did not provide a point of view so much 
as immediacy of effect. In the same way grammatical tenses 
and syntax were managed by medieval writers, not with an idea 
to sequence in time or in space, but to indicate importance of