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As for the volume that revil'd the dames,
"Twas torn to fragments, and condemn'd to flames.
Now Heav'n, on all my husbands gone, bestow
Pleasures above, for tortures felt below :

That rest they wish'd for, grant them in the grave,
And bless those fouls my conduct help'd to save!

THE lines of Pope, in the piece before us, are spirited and easy, and have, properly enough, a free colloquial air. One passage I cannot forbear quoting, as it acquaints us with the writers who were popular in the time of Chaucer. The jocofe old woman says, that her husband frequently read to her out of a volume that contained

"Valerius, whole; and of Saint Jerome, part;
Chryfippus and Tertullian, Ovid's Art,
Solomon's Proverbs, Eloisa's loves;

With many more than fure the Church approves."

VER. 359.

Pope has omitted a stroke of humour; for, in the original, she naturally mistakes the rank and age of St. Jerome; the lines must be tranfcribed,

" Yclepid Valerie and Theophraft,

At which boke he lough alway full faft;

And eke there was a clerk sometime in Rome,
A cardinal, that hightin St. Jerome,
That made a boke agenst Jovinian,
In which boke there was eke Tertullian,
Chryfippus, Trotula, and Helowis,
That was an abbess not ferr fro Paris,
And eke the Parables of Solomon,
Ovid'is art, and bokis many a one."

In the library which Charles V. founded in France, about the year 1376, among many books of devotion, astrology, chemistry, and romance, there was not one copy of Tully to be found, and no Latin poet but Ovid, Lucan, and Boethius; some French translations of Livy, Valerius Maximus, and St. Austin's City of God. He placed these in one of the towers, called The Tower of the Library. This was the foundation of the present magnificent royal library at Paris.

The tale, to which this is the prologue, has been verfified by Dryden, and is supposed to have been of Chaucer's own inven.

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tion; as is the exquisite Vision of the Flower and the Leaf, which has received a thousand new graces from the spirited and harmo. nious Dryden. It is to his Fables, (next to his Music Ode,) written when he was above seventy years old, that Dryden will chiefly owe his immortality; and among these, particularly to the well-conducted tale of Palamon and Arcite, the pathetic picture of Sigifmunda, the wild and terrible graces of Theodore and Honoria, and the sportive pleasantry of Cymon and Iphigenia.

These pieces of Chaucer were not the only ones that were ver. fified by Pope. Mr. Harte assured me, that he was convinced by fome circumstances which Fenton his friend communicated to him, that Pope wrote the characters that make the introduction to the Canterbury Tales, published under the name of Betterton.

WARTON.

Dr. Warton thinks "one cannot but wonder at Pope's choice from Chaucer of these stories, when so many more are to be found in him more poetical." His observation on Chaucer's poems is very juft, but the fact is, Pope, by this very felection, shewed the bent of his mind that it was rather turned to fatire and ridicule, than to the more elevated strains of poetry.

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