and some virtuous; some are unlearn’d, or (as Chaucer calls them) lewd, and some are learn’d.  Even the ribaldry of the low characters is different:  the Reeve, the Miller, and the Cook are several men, and distinguished from each other, as much as the mincing Lady Prioress and the broad-speaking gap-tooth’d Wife of Bath.  But enough of this:  there is such a variety of game springing up before me, that I am distracted in my choice, and know not which to follow.  ’Tis sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is God’s plenty.  We have our forefathers and great-grandames all before us, as they were in Chaucer’s days; their general characters are still remaining in mankind, and even in England, tho’ they are call’d by other names than those of Monks and Friars, and Canons, and Lady Abbesses, and Nuns:  for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature, tho’ everything is alter’d.  May I have leave to do myself the justice—­since my enemies will do me none, and are so far from granting me to be a good poet, that they will not allow me so much as to be a Christian, or a moral man—­may I have leave, I say, to inform my reader that I have confin’d my choice to such tales of Chaucer as savor nothing of immodesty.  If I had desir’d more to please than to instruct, the Reeve, the Miller, the Shipman, the Merchant, the Sumner, and, above all, the Wife of Bath, in the prologue to her tale, would have procured me as many friends and readers, as there are beaux and ladies of pleasure in the town.  But I will no more offend against good manners:  I am sensible, as I ought to be, of the scandal I have given by my loose writings; and make what reparation I am able, by this public acknowledgment.  If anything of this nature, or of profaneness, be crept into these poems, I am so far from defending it, that I disown it. Totum hoc indictum volo.[25] Chaucer makes another manner of apology for his broad speaking, and Boccace makes the like; but I will follow neither of them.  Our countryman, in the end of his characters, before the Canterbury Tales, thus excuses the ribaldry, which is very gross in many of his novels: 

But first, I pray you of your courtesy, That ye ne arrete[26] it nought my villany, Though that I plainly speak in this mattere To tellen you her[27] words, and eke her chere:  Ne though I speak her words properly, For this ye knowen as well as I, Who shall tellen a tale after a man, He mote rehearse as nye as ever he can:  Everich word of it been in his charge, All speke he never so rudely ne large. Or else he mote tellen his tale untrue, Or feine things, or find words new:  He may not spare, altho he were his brother, He mote as well say o word as another.  Christ spake himself full broad in holy writ, And well I wote no villany is it.  Eke Plato saith, who so can him rede, The words mote[28] been cousin to the dede.[29]

Yet if a man should have enquired of Boccace or of