the appreciation of Chaucer, as showing Dryden's infallible instinct and generous enthusiasm for the best in literature, and the limitations of that instinct under the injurious influence of contemporary taste and fashion. He approached the task of turning the Knight's Tale into "our language as it is now refined" in the same spirit that led actors in the eighteenth century to play the part of Macbeth in court dress. He was too good a critic not to recognize the genius of his original. He protests that no man ever had, or could have, a greater veneration for Chaucer than himself. If he has altered him anywhere for the better, he acknowledges he could have done nothing without him. Chaucer, he says, is a perpetual fountain of good sense, and speaks properly on all subjects; he knows when to leave off; he follows nature everywhere, but never goes beyond her; he must have been a man of "a most wonderful comprehensive nature," because he has taken into the compass of his Canterbury Tales the various manners and humours of the whole English nation in his age. "Tis sufficient to say,' he concludes, "according to the proverb, that here is God's plenty."

But to Dryden, Chaucer is "a rough diamond, and must first be polished ere he shines." In common with his contemporaries he believed that the English language had reached its zenith under the Restoration. The writer of the preface to the second part of Waller's poems (1692) asks whether English did not come to its full perfection in the reign of Charles the Second, and whether "it had not had its Augustan age as well as the Latin." In the epilogue to the second part of the Conquest of Granada Dryden asserted that wit had reached a higher degree than ever before, and that the English language was never so free and so refined;

and in his Defence of the Epilogue he maintained that the language, wit, and conversation of his age were improved and refined above the last. Like Pope, he attributed this refinement to the influence of the court, and especially of the king, "in every taste of foreign courts improved." Even in the age of the Elizabethan dramatists, he held, there was less gallantry than in his own, "neither did they keep the best company of theirs." They were not conversant in courts, and "were unlucky to have been bred in an unpolished age, and more unlucky to live to a refined one."

Comparing Dryden's Palamon and Arcite with Chaucer's Knight's Tale, we find that his purpose, generally seems to be to make the language more pointed, epigrammatic, and antithetical; to render the vague more definite, and the allusive more explicit; to fill in outlines and to complete pictures; to make the narrative logical and consistent, and to supply missing links in the chain of thought; to dignify, polish and adorn; in short, to array what he conceived to be the crude and primitive simplicity of Chaucer's language in the elegant and ornate court dress of Restoration rhetoric.

In judging Dryden's version of Chaucer we should, as Pope urges, "regard the writer's end," and read it "with the same spirit that its author writ." He made it, he tells us himself, "not for the use of some old Saxon friends," but "for their sakes who understand sense and poetry as well as they, when that poetry and sense is put into words which they understand." He wished to perpetuate the memory of Chaucer, or at least refresh it, among his countrymen. With this pious end in view he expressed the poetry and the sense of Chaucer in the language that suited the taste of the eighteenth century, and, though to-day it seems

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like making Palamon masquerade in periwig, he succeeded in gaining general recognition and appreciation for one of our greatest poets, who had for two centuries remained comparatively unknown.

In the preface to the Fables Dryden has the critical insight to discern and the courage to maintain, in the face of the classical taste of the period and the prevalent ignorance of our earlier literature, the superiority of Chaucer over Ovid. His disparagement of the language of Chaucer is due partly to his want of familiarity with Middle English, partly to the vicious taste of the period, which regarded dignity, polish, and refinement as essential and paramount qualities in a "correct" style. But his strong sense and sound judgment revolted from this vicious taste when it regarded "conceits and jingles" as wit. To Dryden they are "only glittering trifles, and so far from being witty, that in a serious poem they are nauseous, because they are unnatural." He exposes the common fallacy of excusing imperfect and slipshod workmanship on the plea of the short time allowed for the work. The reader, he says, will ask, "Why they allowed not a longer time to make their works more perfect? and why they had so despicable an opinion of their judges, as to thrust their indigested stuff upon them, as if they deserved no better?" He recognises that his own genius is more akin to Homer than to Virgil, and rightly contrasts the impetuosity and fire of the former with the quieter and more sedate temper of the latter. While allowing the originality of Virgil's episodes and construction, he points to his comparatively limited invention and his borrowed design. Incidentally he strikes off a terse definition of epic poetry as "the imitation of human

life." His poetical imagination enabled him to see all the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales, their humours, their features, and their very dress, as distinctly as if he had supped with them at the Tabard in Southwark. He observes how Chaucer distinguishes them "not only in their inclinations, but in their very physiognomies and persons." He notices the propriety of the matter and manner of their tales, and of their telling, to their different educations, humours, and callings. He shows that there is a difference in the gravity of the serious characters and the ribaldry of the lewd.

One of the most striking characteristics of Dryden's prose style, and one which largely contributed to its flexibility and naturalness, was his free use of metaphorical language drawn from the vernacular, expressions coming home to men's business and bosoms,-a literary device of which Burke was afterwards to prove himself such a consummate master. Speaking of his avoidance of wanton thoughts and irreverent expressions in the Fables, he says: "if the searchers find any in the cargo, let them be staved or forfeited, like counterbanded goods; at least let their authors be answerable for them, as being but imported merchandise, and not of my own manufacture." Comparing Chaucer with Boccaccio, he says: "our countryman carries weight, and yet wins the race at disadvantage." He accounts for the decay in Cowley's vogue by his fondness for conceits: "there was plenty enough, but the dishes were ill sorted; whole pyramids of sweetmeats for boys and women, but little solid meat for men." The genial humour which pervades his prefaces is seen in his excuse for continuing his translation of Ovid after finishing the twelfth book of the Metamorphoses: "here I ought in reason to have stopped; but the speeches of