hough gentle yet not dull.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 114: The reader might compare these twenty-eight lines
following, which contain the same matter, with eighty-four of Chaucer,
beginning thus:

Tho came the sixthe companye,
And gan faste to Fame cry, &c.,

being too prolix to be here inserted.--POPE.]

[Footnote 115: "A pretty fame," says Dennis, "when the very smartest of
these coxcombs is sure to have his name rotten before his carcase. When
the author introduced these fellows into the temple of Fame, he ought to
have made the chocolate-house, and the side-box, part of it." The
criticism was just. The contemptible creatures who buzzed their
profligate falsehoods for the hour, and were heard of no more, should
have been introduced, if at all, into the Temple of Rumour, and not into
the Temple of Fame. Pope followed Chaucer.]

[Footnote 116: Strokes of pleasantry and humour, and satirical
reflections on the foibles of common life, are unsuited to so grave and
majestic a poem. They appear as unnatural and out of place as one of the
burlesque scenes of Heemskirk would do in a solemn landscape of Poussin.
When I see such a line as

And at each blast a lady's honour dies

in the Temple of Fame, I lament as much to find it placed there as to
see shops and sheds and cottages erected among the ruins of Diocletian's
baths.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 117: Pope places the temple of Fame on a precipitous rock of
ice, and Dennis charges him with departing from his allegory when he
describes the self-indulgent multitude, who are "even fatigued with
ease," as having toiled up the "steep and slippery ascent" to present
themselves before the goddess. There is the same defect in Chaucer.]

[Footnote 118:

Tho come another companye
That Lad ydone the treachery, &c.--POPE.

Pope in this paragraph had not only Chaucer in view, but the passage of
Virgil where he describes the criminals in the infernal regions. The
second line of Pope's opening couplet was suggested by Dryden's
translation, AEneis, vi. 825:

Expel their parents and usurp the throne.]

[Footnote 119: A glance at the Revolution of 1688.--CROKER.]

[Footnote 120: The scene here changes from the Temple of Fame to that of
Rumour, which is almost entirely Chaucer's. The particulars follow:

Tho saw I stonde in a valey,
Under the castle faste by
A house, that Domus Dedali
That Labyrinthus cleped is,
Nas made so wonderly I