How far did any knowledge or love of the old romantic literature of
England survive among the contemporaries of Dryden and Pope? It is not
hard to furnish an answer to this question. The prefaces of Dryden, the
critical treatises of Dennis, Winstanley, Oldmixon, Rymer, Langbaine,
Gildon, Shaftesbury, and many others, together with hundreds of passages
in prologues and epilogues to plays; in periodical essays like the
_Tatler_ and _Spectator_; in verse essays like Roscommon's, Mulgrave's
and Pope's; in prefaces to various editions of Shakspere and Spenser; in
letters, memoirs, etc., supply a mass of testimony to the fact that
neglect and contempt had, with a few exceptions, overtaken all English
writers who wrote before the middle of the seventeenth century. The
exceptions, of course, were those supreme masters whose genius prevailed
against every change of taste: Shakspere and Milton, and, in a less
degree, Chaucer and Spenser. Of authors strictly mediaeval, Chaucer
still had readers, and there were reprints of his works in 1687, 1721,
and 1737,[1] although no critical edition appeared until Tyrwhitt's in
1775-78. It is probable, however, that the general reader, if he read
Chaucer at all, read him in such modernized versions as Dryden's "Fables"
and Pope's "January and May." Dryden's preface has some admirable
criticism of Chaucer, although it is evident, from what he says about the
old poet's versification, that the secret of Middle English scansion and
pronunciation had already been lost. Prior and Pope, who seem to have
been attracted chiefly to the looser among the "Canterbury Tales," made
each a not very successful experiment at burlesque imitation of
Chaucerian language.

Outside of Chaucer, and except among antiquarians and professional
scholars, there was no remembrance of the whole _corpus poetarum_ of the
English Middle Age: none of the metrical romances, rhymed chronicles,
saints' legends, miracle plays, minstrel ballads, verse homilies, manuals