Search -
The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq: Poems. Miscellanies
The Works of Alexander Pope Esq Poems Miscellanies Author:Alexander Pope Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE WIFE OF BATH HER PROLOGUE. FROM CHAUCER. VOL. II. f I' HE Wife of Bath is the other piece of Chaucer which Pope JL felected to imitate. One cann... more »ot but wonder at his choice, which perhaps nothing but his youth could excufe. Dryden, who is known not to be nicely fcrupulous, informs us, that he would not verfify it on account of its indecency. Pope, however, has omitted or foftened the groflerand more offenGve paflages. Chaucer afforded him many fubjects of a more fublime and ferious fpecies; and it were to be wifhed Pope had exercifed his pencil on the pathetic ftory of the patience of Grifilda, or Troilus and Creffida, or the Complaint of the Black Knight; or, above all, on Cam- bufcan and Canace. From the accidental circumftance of Diy- den and Pope's having copied the gay and ludicrous parts of Chaucer, the common notion feems to have arifen, that Chaucer's vein of poetry was chiefly turned to the light and the ridiculous. But they who look into Chaucer will foon be convinced of this pre. vailing prejudice, and will find his comic vein, like that of Shake- fpear, to be only like one of mercury, imperceptibly mingled with a mine of gold. Mr. Hughes withdrew his contributions to a volume of Mif- cellaneous Poems, publifhed by Steel, becaufe this prologue was to be inferted in it, which he thought too obfcene for the gravity of his character. " The want of a few lines," fays Mr. Tyrwhitt, "to introduce The Wife of Bath's Prologue, is perhaps one of thofe defefls which Chaucer would have fupplied, if he had lived to finifh his work. The extraordinary length of it, as well as the vein of pleafantry that runs through it, is very fuitable to the character of the fpeaker. The greateft part muft have been of Chaucer's own invention, though one may plainly fee that h...« less