“Now friends no more, nor walking hand in hand,
  But when they met, they made a surly stand,
  And glared like angry lions as they passed,
  And wished that every look might be their last.”

But the modern must yield the palm, despite the beauty of his versification, to the description of Emily by Chaucer; and may be justly accused of loading the dying speech of Arcite with conceits for which his original gave no authority.[14]

When the story is of a light and ludicrous kind, as the Fable of the Cock and Fox, and the Wife of Bath’s Tale, Dryden displays all the humorous expression of his satirical poetry, without its personality.  There is indeed a quaint Cervantic gravity in his mode of expressing himself, that often glances forth, and enlivens what otherwise would be mere dry narrative.  Thus, he details certain things which passed,

  “While Cynion was endeavouring to be wise;”

the force of which single word contains both a ludicrous and appropriate picture of the revolution which the force of love was gradually creating in the mind of the poor clown.  This tone of expression he perhaps borrowed from Ariosto, and other poets of Italian chivalry, who are wont, ever and anon, to raise the mask, and smile even at the romantic tale they are themselves telling.

Leaving these desultory reflections on Dryden’s powers of narrative, I cannot but notice, that, from haste or negligence, he has sometimes mistaken the sense of his author.  Into the hands of the champions in “The Flower and the Leaf,” he has placed bows instead of boughs, because the word is in the original spelled bowes; and, having made the error, he immediately devises an explanation of the device which he had mistaken:—­

  “For bows the strength of brawny arms imply,
  Emblems of valour, and of victory.”

He has, in like manner, accused Chaucer of introducing Gallicisms into the English language; not aware that French was the language of the court of England not long before Chaucer’s time, and, that, far from introducing French phrases into the English tongue, the ancient bard was successfully active in introducing the English as a fashionable dialect, instead of the French, which had, before his time, been the only language of polite literature in England.  Other instances might be given of similar oversights, which, in the situation of Dryden, are sufficiently pardonable.

Upon the whole, in introducing these romances of Boccacio and Chaucer to modern readers, Dryden has necessarily deprived them of some of the charms which they possess for those who have perused them in their original state.  With a tale or poem, by which we have been sincerely interested, we connect many feelings independent of those arising from actual poetical merit.  The delight, arising from the whole, sanctions, nay, sanctifies, the faulty passages; and even actual improvements,