improve the
construction of Chaucer's work, only mutilated it. As it stands, it is
clear and digestible; and how many allegories, one may take leave to
ask, in our own allegory-loving literature or in any other, merit the
same commendation? For the rest, Pope's own immortal "Dunciad," though
doubtless more immediately suggested by a personal satire of Dryden's,
is in one sense a kind of travesty of the "House of Fame,"--A "House of
Infamy."

In the theme of this poem there was undoubtedly something that could
hardly fail to humour the half-melancholy mood in which it was
manifestly written. Are not, the poet could not but ask himself, all
things vanity; "as men say, what may ever last?" Yet the subject
brought its consolation likewise. Patient labour, such as this poem
attests, is the surest road to that enduring fame, which is "conserved
with the shade;" and awaking from his vision, Chaucer takes leave of
the reader with a resolution already habitual to him--to read more and
more, instead of resting satisfied with the knowledge he has already
acquired. And in the last of the longer poems which seem assignable to
this period of his life, he proves that one Latin poet at least--Venus'
clerk, whom in the "House of Fame" he behold standing on a pillar of
her own Cyprian metal--had been read as well as celebrated by him

Of this poem, the fragmentary "Legend of Good Women," the "Prologue"
possesses a peculiar biographical as well as literary interest. In his
personal feelings on the subject of love and marriage, Chaucer had,
when he wrote this "Prologue," evidently almost passed even beyond the
sarcastic stage. And as a poet he was now clearly conscious of being
no longer a beginner, no longer a learner only, but one whom his age
knew, and in whom it took a critical interest. The list including most
of his undoubted works, which he here recites, shows of itself that
those already spoken of in the foregoing pages were by this time known
to the world, together with two of the "Canterbury Tales," which had
either been put forth independently, or (as seems much less probable)
had formed the first instalment of his great work. A further proof of
the relatively late date of this "Prologue" occurs in the contingent
offer which it makes of the poem to "the Queen," who can be no other
than Richard II's young consort Anne. At the very outset we find
Chaucer as it were reviewing his own literary position--and doing so in