he grave and serious characters are
distinguished by their several sorts of gravity: their discourses are
such as belong to their age, their calling, and their breeding; such as
are becoming of them, and of them only. Some of his persons are vicious,
and some virtuous; some are unlearned, or (as Chaucer calls them) lewd,
and some are learned. Even the ribaldry of the low characters is
different. The Reeve, the Miller, and the Cook, are several men, and
distinguished from each other, as much as the mincing Lady Prioress, and
the broad-speaking gap-toothed Wife of Bath. But enough of this: there
is such a variety of game springing up before me, that I am distracted
in my choice, and know not which to follow. 'Tis sufficient to say,
according to the proverb, that here is God's plenty. We have our
forefathers and great-granddames all before us, as they were in
Chaucer's days: their general characters are still remaining in mankind,
and even in England, though they are called by other names than those of
monks and friars, and chanons, and lady abbesses, and nuns: for mankind
is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature, though every thing is
altered. May I have leave to do myself the justice, (since my enemies
will do me none, and are so far from granting me to be a good poet, that
they will not allow me so much as to be a Christian, or a moral man);
may I have leave, I say, to inform my reader, that I have confined my
choice to such tales of Chaucer as savour nothing of immodesty. If I had
desired more to please than to instruct, the Reeve, the Miller, the
Shipman, the Merchants, the Sumner, and above all the Wife of Bath, in
the prologue to her tale, would have procured me as many friends and
readers as there are beaux and ladies of pleasure in the town. But I
will no more offend against good manners. I am sensible, as I ought to
be, of the scandal I have given by my loose writings; and make what
reparation I am able by this public acknowledgment. If any thing of this
nature, or of profaneness, be crept into these poems, I am so far from
defending it, that I disown it. _Totum hoc indicium volo._ Chaucer makes
another manner of apology for his broad-speaking, and Boccace makes the
like; but I will follow neither of them. Our countryman, in the end of
his characters, before the Canterbury tales, thus excuses the ribaldry,
which is very gross in many of his novels.

"But first, I pray you of your courtesy,
That ye ne