was not fashionable in Pope's time, nor among his
acquaintance, attentively to study these poets. I own I have some
particular reasons for thinking that he was not very conversant in this
sort of composition, having no inclination to the drama. In a note on
the third book of his Homer, where Helen points out to Priam the names
and characters of the Grecian leaders from the walls of Troy, he
observes, that several great poets have been engaged by the beauty of
this passage to an imitation of it. But who are the poets he enumerates
on this occasion? Only Statius and Tasso; the former of whom, in his
seventh book, and the latter in his third, shows the forces and the
commanders that invested the cities of Thebes and Jerusalem. Not a
syllable is mentioned of that capital scene in the Phoenissae of
Euripides, from the hundred and twentieth to the two hundredth line,
where the old man, standing with Antigone on the walls of Thebes, marks
out to her the various figures, habits, armour, and qualifications of
each different warrior, in the most lively and picturesque manner, as
they appear in the camp beneath them. In conclusion, we may observe that
Pope's alterations of Chaucer are introduced with judgment and art, and
that these alterations are more in number, and more important in
conduct, than any Dryden has made of the same author.

The Temple of Fame was communicated to Steele, who entertained a high
opinion of its beauties, and who conveyed it to Addison. Pope had
ornamented the poem with the machinery of guardian angels, which he
afterwards omitted. He speaks of his work with a diffidence uncommon in
a young poet, and which does him credit. "No errors," he says to Steele,
"are so trivial but they deserve to be mended. I could point you to
several; but it is my business to be informed of those faults I do not
know, and as for those I do, not to talk of them but to correct them.
You speak of that poem in a style I neither merit nor expect, but, I
assure you, if you freely mark or dash out, I shall look upon your blots
to be its greatest beauties,--I mean, if Mr. Addison and yourself should
like it in the whole. I am afraid of nothing so much as to impose
anything on the world which is unworthy its acceptance."--WARTON.

Chaucer's poem contains great strokes of Gothic imagination, yet
bordering often on the most ideal and capricious extravagance. Pope has
imitated this piece with his usual elegance of diction and harmony of