his judgment in adopting the lighter
fairy race of Shakespeare and Milton. Chaucer has king Pluto and his
queen Proserpina.--BOWLES.

There was not much judgment required. They are fairies in Chaucer, but,
as was not unusual in his day, he called them by names taken from the
heathen mythology. Pope merely dropped the classical appellations, which
would have been an incongruity when he wrote. In the details of his
description he did not copy Shakespeare or Milton, but Dryden's version
of Chaucer's Wife of Bath:

The king of elfs, and little fairy queen
Gambolled on heaths, and danced on ev'ry green.]

[Footnote 45: Another couplet preceded this in the first edition:

Thus many a day with ease and plenty blessed
Our gen'rous knight his gentle dame possessed.]

[Footnote 46: Dryden's Palamon and Arcite:

Nor art, nor nature's band can ease my grief,
Nothing but death, the wretch's last relief.]

[Footnote 47: There is a natural trait in the original which is not
preserved by Pope. The knight weeps piteously at his sudden calamity:

But atte last, after a month or tweye,
His sorrow gan assuage sooth to say;
For when he wist it may not other be
He patiently took his adversitie.

This is one of the deeper and more solemn touches which Pope
systematically rejected. Although the old man gets reconciled to the
loss of his sight, his jealousy remains unabated.]

[Footnote 48:

Oh! January, what might it thee avail
If thou might see as far as shippes sail?
For as good is blind deceived be,
As to be deceived when a man may see.]

[Footnote 49: Chaucer only says that they whispered through the crevice
they discovered in the wall which divided the houses of their parents.
All their kisses were bestowed upon the wall itself, or as Sandys puts
it in his translation of Ovid,

Their kisses greet
The senseless stones, with lips that could not meet.]

[Footnote 50: This couplet, which is not in the original, is in the
style of the pastorals which were common in Pope's youth.]

[Footnote 51:

Thou art the creature that I best love;
For by the Lord that sit in heaven above,
Lever I had to dyen on a knife.
Than thee offende, deare, trewe wife.]

[Footnote 52: By the injudicious interpolation of this parenthesis Pope
makes the knight express his belief to May that she is more likely to be
kept faithful by her love of