r the treatment experienced by
Chaucer in the Augustan Age, to which he was a barbarian only to be
tolerated if put into the court-dress of the final period of
civilisation. Still, even thus, he was not left altogether unread; nor
was he in all cases adapted without a certain measure of success. The
irrepressible vigour, and the frequent felicity, of Dryden's "Fables"
contrast advantageously with the tame evenness of the "Temple of Fame,"
an early effort by Pope, who had wit enough to imitate in a juvenile
parody some of the grossest peculiarities of Chaucer's manner, but who
would have been quite ashamed to reproduce him in a serious literary
performance, without the inevitable polish and cadence of his own style
of verse. Later modernisations--even of those which a band of poets in
some instances singularly qualified for the task put forth in a
collection published in the year 1841, and which, on the part of some
of them at least, was the result of conscientious endeavour--it is
needless to characterise here. Slight incidental use has been made of
some of these in this essay, the author of which would gladly have
abstained from printing a single modernised phrase or word--most of all
any which he has himself been guilty of re-casting. The time cannot be
far distant when even the least unsuccessful of such attempts will no
longer be accepted, because no such attempts whatever will be any
longer required. No Englishman or Englishwoman need go through a very
long or very laborious apprenticeship in order to become able to read,
understand, and enjoy what Chaucer himself wrote. But if this
apprenticeship be too hard, then some sort of makeshift must be
accepted, or antiquity must remain the "canker-worm" even of a great
national poet, as Spenser said it had already in his day proved to be
of Chaucer.

Meanwhile, since our poetic literature has long thrown off the shackles
which forced it to adhere to one particular group of models, he is not
a true English poet who should remain uninfluenced by any of the really
great among his predecessors. If Chaucer has again, in a special
sense, become the "master dear and father reverent" of some of our
living poets, in a wider sense he must hold this relation to them all
and to all their successors, so long as he continues to be known and
understood. As it is, there are few worthies of our literature whose
names seem to awaken throughout the English-speaking world a readier