vulgar judges, which are nine parts in ten of all nations, who call conceits and jingles wit, who see Ovid full of them, and Chaucer altogether without them, will think me little less than mad, for preferring the Englishman to the Roman:  yet, with their leave, I must presume to say that the things they admire are only glittering trifles, and so far from being witty, that in a serious poem they are nauseous, because they are unnatural.  Would any man who is ready to die for love describe his passion like Narcissus?  Would he think of inopem me copia fecit,[11] and a dozen more of such expressions, pour’d on the neck of one another, and signifying all the same thing?  If this were wit, was this a time to be witty, when the poor wretch was in the agony of death?  This is just John Littlewit in Bartholomew Fair,[12] who had a conceit (as he tells you) left him in his misery; a miserable conceit.  On these occasions the poet should endeavor to raise pity; but instead of this, Ovid is tickling you to laugh.  Virgil never made use of such machines, when he was moving you to commiserate the death of Dido:  he would not destroy what he was building.  Chaucer makes Arcite violent in his love, and unjust in the pursuit of it; yet when he came to die, he made him think more reasonably:  he repents not of his love, for that had alter’d his character; but acknowledges the injustice of his proceedings, and resigns Emilia to Palamon.  What would Ovid have done on this occasion?  He would certainly have made Arcite witty on his deathbed.  He had complain’d he was farther off from possession by being so near, and a thousand such boyisms, which Chaucer rejected as below the dignity of the subject.  They who think otherwise would by the same reason prefer Lucan and Ovid to Homer and Virgil, and Martial to all four of them.  As for the turn of words, in which Ovid particularly excels all poets, they are sometimes a fault, and sometimes a beauty, as they are us’d properly or improperly; but in strong passions always to be shunn’d, because passions are serious, and will admit no playing.  The French have a high value for them; and I confess, they are often what they call delicate, when they are introduced with judgment; but Chaucer writ with more simplicity, and followed nature more closely, than to use them.  I have thus far, to the best of my knowledge, been an upright judge betwixt the parties in competition, not meddling with the design nor the disposition of it; because the design was not their own, and in the disposing of it they were equal.  It remains that I say somewhat of Chaucer in particular.