t is difficult to conceive that
anybody could be injured by reading her confessions, which have nothing
alluring, but with Warton, we must condemn the taste which could select
the story as a ground-work for the embellishments of modern verse. The
character may exist in every generation. The unblushing candour with
which it displays itself belonged to more outspoken times than our own.
Chaucer painted from the life, and this portrait of a coarse,
voluptuous, defiant woman of the citizen class, finds a place in his
gallery, because she had a prominent place in the society of the middle
ages. There was no rational motive for tricking her out in the newest
fashion of a period to which she did not belong, and she might with
advantage have been allowed to remain in her primitive place and garb.
The indelicacy of the pieces he translated from Chaucer was, however,
one of their recommendations to Pope, and they may have had a further
attraction for him from the fact, that they held wives up to odium. His
deformed and insignificant person was an antidote to love, and the court
he paid to women met with a cold return. He retaliated with his pen for
the mortification to which they exposed him, and he almost always
represented them in a frivolous or degrading light. He may not
improbably have had a pleasure in reproducing from Chaucer the caustic
sentiments which were congenial to his own, and may have found some
satisfaction for his wounded spirit in revenging indifference by
satire.

Warton says that Pope has softened the more offensive passages in the
Wife of Bath's Prologue, but his version, on the other hand, is often
less decorous than the original. He has not justified his choice of the
subject by his skill in the treatment of it. The adaptation is much
inferior to the companion piece of January and May, and appears to have
been thrown off in haste. There are a few, a very few, happy lines and
expressions, but the bulk of the versification is not much above
mediocrity, and is frequently below it. He has failed in the substance
still more than in the form. Roscoe was of opinion that the humour of
Chaucer had hardly suffered any evaporation. The admirers of the
original have arrived at a different conclusion, and have contended,
with almost one voice, that hardly any of the humour has been preserved.
The genuine Prologue is alive with manners, passions, idiomatic
conversations, and natural incidents. The copy is by comparison