ortality and
Profaneness of the Stage_, 1698.]

[Footnote 7: "Energetic, irascible, unyielding, vehement."--Horace,
_Ars Poet._121.]

[Footnote 8: "Whithersoever the fates drag us to and fro, let us
follow."--Virgil, _AEneid_, v. 709.]

[Footnote 9: The statements that follow as to Chaucer's sources are
mostly not in accord with the results of modern scholarship.]

[Footnote 10: The plot of neither of these poems was original with
Chaucer.]

[Footnote 11: "Plenty has made me poor."--_Meta._ iii, 466.]

[Footnote 12: By Ben Jonson.]

[Footnote 13: Cowley]

[Footnote 14: 'Too much a poet'--Martial iii 44 (not Catullus)]

[Footnote 15: Suited to the ears of that time]

[Footnote 16: Speght, whom modern scholarship has shown to be right in
this matter.]

[Footnote 17: What follows on Chaucer's life is full of errors.]

[Footnote 18: Wondered at]

[Footnote 19: A spurious "Plowman's Tale" was included in the older
editions of Chaucer.]

[Footnote 20: A law term for slander of a man of high rank, involving
more severe punishment than ordinary slander.]

[Footnote 21: Henry II. and Thomas a Becket.]

[Footnote 22: Dr. James Drake wrote a reply to Jeremy Collier's _Short
View_.]

[Footnote 23: "He did the first injury"]

[Footnote 24: A Neapolitan physician who wrote on physiognomy.]

[Footnote 25: "I wish all this unsaid."]

[Footnote 26: Reckon.]

[Footnote 27: Their.]

[Footnote 28: Must.]

[Footnote 29: The corrupt state of the text of this passage is enough
to explain why Dryden found Chaucer rough.]

[Footnote 30: "Many words which have now fallen out of use shall be
born again; and others which are now in honor shall fall, if custom
wills it, in the force of which lie the judgement and law and rules of
speech."--Horace _Ars Poet._ 70-72.]

[Footnote 31: "It is easy to add to what is already invented."]

[Footnote 32: Dionco and Fiametta sang together a long time of Arcite
and Palamon.]

[Footnote 33: Not by Chaucer.]

[Footnote 34: Rev. Luke Milbourne, who had attacked Dryden's Virgil.]

[Footnote 35: Sir Richard Blackmore, who had censured Dryden for the
indecency of his writings.]

[Footnote 36: "The argument from abuse to use is not valid."]

[Footnote 37: "You, Demetrius and Tigellius, I bid lament among
the chairs of your scholars." Blackmore had once been a
schoolmaster.--Noyes.]

PREFACE TO JOSEPH ANDREWS

BY HENRY FIELDING (1742)[A]

THE COMIC EPIC IN PROSE