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,